Medicine in the Remote and Rural North, 1800–2000

Editors: J T H Connor and Stephan Curtis


Studies for the Society for the Social History of Medicine
Hb: 320pp: 2011
978 1 84893 157 2: 234x156mm: £60.00/$99.00
E ISBN   978 1 84893 158 9

‘The North’ is more than just a geographical area. It is a place of cold and hardship on the one hand and of welcome solitude and opportunity on the other – a place requiring adaptation and compromise. The medical practitioners responsible for providing healthcare to the populations of these regions endured the daily hardships of surviving in such an inhospitable environment and had the added burden of negotiating between different cultures. They represented the state and external authority and brought new innovations to previously isolated communities.

This volume of thirteen essays focuses on the health and treatment of the peoples of northern Europe and North America over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Numerous themes and topics are raised that are relevant not only to a discussion of how medicine was practised in rural and remote areas of the recent past, but also to current attempts to improve medical care in more isolated regions of the world.

Sample pages

Readership

History of Science and Medicine, Human and Historical Geography and Anthropology

Contents

Introduction: Cores/Peripheries – Rural/Remote: Medicine, Health-Care Delivery and the North – Stephan Curtis

Part I: Remote Medicine and the State
1 Medical Services in a Northern Russian Province, 1864–1917 – Steven Cherry and Francis King
2 Changing Minority Culture: Health Services and Health Promotion in Northern Norway, 1900–50s – Teemu Ryymin
3 The Sami, Sami-ness and the Staffing of Health Services in Northern Norway, 1960s–2001 – Astri Andresen
4 Foreshadowing the Future: Health Services in Remote Areas, the National Health Service and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, 1948–74 – Marguerite Dupree

Part II: Doctors and Doctoring in Remote Areas
5 A Country Doctor: Health Care in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century Swedish Remote Area – Sören Edvinsson
6 Medical Reports from the 1800s and What they Tell about Health Conditions, Population and the Work of Doctors in Peripheral Norway – Øivind Larsen
7 ‘Medicine is Here to Stay’: Rural Medical Practice, the Northern Frontier and Modernization in 1930s’ Newfoundland – J T H Connor
8 Policing Practitioners on the Periphery: Elite Physicians and Profession-Building in a Bicultural Province, 1920–39 – Sasha Mullally

Part III: Women, Health Care and the Practice of Medicine
9 The West Greenlandic Midwives 1820–1920: Mediators between their Compatriots and Danish Doctors – Mette Rønsager
10 Delivering Health Care in Rural New Brunswick: Outpost Nursing in the Twentieth Century – Linda Kealey
11 Mother’s Medicine: Women, Home and Health in the Peace River Region of British Columbia, Canada, 1920–40 – Megan J Davies
12 Call of the Wild: Public Health Nursing in Post-War Lapland – Marianne Junila

Reviews

‘An ambitious book [which] deserves to succeed in its aim to open up the history of medical practice in the sparsely populated regions of the extreme north as a subject worthy of the attention of historians.’
– Morrice McCrae, Annals of Science

Related titles

Return to top

Pickering & Chatto