Volumes 60-64
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 Clio Medica 64:
Bacchic Medicine
Harry W. Paul
Wine has always been a part of popular medicine. Bacchic Medicine analyses the historical role of wine in the treatment of disease and preservation of health.
The Hippocratic texts gave wine therapy a canonical statement over two millennia ago; but the nineteenth century was the golden age of alcohol and wine therapy. The Germans and the British gave us early canons of wine therapy and, heavily endowed with wine cultural capital, the French followed. But like all therapies, alcohol and wine therapies were not without danger and some of the ‘iatrogenic’ tales are still with us.
In the twentieth century, many doctors rallied to the defence of wine both as a substitute for more dangerous alcoholic drinks and as an efficacious medicament, with an impressive case for the efficacy of wine in fighting bacteria, heart disease and cancer. New science based on animal models and ionic theory fortified their arguments. According to the controversial ‘French Paradox’, wine drinking makes it possible for a population to enjoy a high fat diet yet suffer little. Bacchic Medicine also discusses the contemporary debate over the role of alcohol and wine in preventive medicine.
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 Clio Medica 63:
Cultures of Neurasthenia
Edited by Roy Porter and Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra
Neurasthenia, meaning nerve weakness, was ‘invented’ in the United States as a disorder of modernity, caused by the fast pace of urban life. Soon after, from the early-1880s onwards, this modern disease crossed the Atlantic. Neurasthenia became much less ‘popular’ in Britain or the Netherlands than in Germany. Neurasthenia’s heyday continued into the first decade of the twentieth century. The label referred to conditions similar to those currently labelled as chronic fatigue syndrome. Why this rise and fall of neurasthenia, and why these differences in popularity?
This book, which emerged out of an Anglo-Dutch-German conference held in June 2000, explores neurasthenia’s manysided history from a comparative perspective.
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 Clio Medica 62:
'Captain of all these men of death': The History of Tuberculosis in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Ireland
Greta Jones
Tuberculosis mortality in the United States and in Britain was declining in the late-nineteenth century but rising in Ireland. Only in the first decade of the twentieth century did mortality from tuberculosis begin to fall and even then it remained higher in Ireland than in Britain and many other European nations throughout the first half of the twentieth century.Why Ireland’s pattern of tuberculosis mortality was different is the subject of this book. Several controversies in the history of tuberculosis epidemics are addressed; the degree to which poverty and standard of living played a part in the tuberculosis decline, the role of public health, urbanisation and gender.
Because tuberculosis was comparatively higher in Ireland it remained a much more potent political issue well into the twentieth century and the interaction between Ireland’s politics and the question of tuberculosis is discussed.
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 Clio Media 61:
Women and Modern Medicine
Edited by Anne Hardy and Laurence Conrad
Modernising scientific medicine emerged in the nineteenth century as an increasingly powerful agent of change in a context of complex social developments. Womens’ lives and expectations in particular underwent a transformation in the years after 1870 as education, employment opportunities and political involvement extended their personal and gender horizons. For women, medicine came to offer not just treatment in the event of illness but the possibilities of participation in medical practise, of shaping social policies and political understandings, and of altering the biological imperatives of their bodies. The essays in this collection explore various ways in which women responded to these challenges and opportunities and sought to use the power of modernising Western medicine to further their individual and gender interests.
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 Clio Medica 60:
Regenerating England
Edited by Christopher Lawrence and Anna-K. Mayer
In the inter-war years there was much debate in Britain as to whether the best path to post-World War I regeneration would be found in the promises of science and technology, in continued and increased efficiency, in specialization and professionalization or whether the future of the nation depended on a rediscovery of older (and more authentic) ways of doing things, on a defiant anti-modernism. This debate on Britain's future was often conducted in terms of Englishness and the rebirth of a lost, more spiritual, village England. However, ‘Englishness' also entered inter-war social thinking through eclectic assimilations of diverse traditions. Prominent themes in the discourses on Britain's post-war regeneration include national character, citizenship, fitness, education, utopia, community and so on. The chapters in the present volume address these themes and break new ground by examining debates well known in political and literary history through their relations to science, medicine, architecture and ideas of social and political ‘health'.
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