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Beddoes's Hygeia comes from hygiene, and Greek theology.
At time of publication, 1802, doctors were often ineffective and
illegitimate because of muddiness between real physicians and quacks and
limited scientific study of new medical treatment. Writer was interested
in increasing scientific interest and legitimacy of medicine.
Medical Manuals were popular at the time and tried to give the literate
middle class ability to manage their own health (because useful doctors
charged exorbitantly). Beddoes criticizes the majority of the genre, but
is itself a medical manual.
Thesis: health is a social ideal of individual habits ("rules and
regulations") for preventive medicine.
Beddoes aligns with modern cultural pressure that health is a moral
issue.
Health is also a relative, sliding scale. The only way to determine
healthfulness is by comparing to an unhealthy person. Also, acquiring
health is a difficult path to determine.
Pre-germ theory medicine is similar to modern neuromedicine, because the
causes and absolute diagnostics are unclear. But Beddoes's and other
contemporary doctors' missions were to "make disease visible." Medical
tools that make disease more visible change how we understand health and
how to become healthy.
This course will cover some of these changes and developments in the
19-20th centuries.
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