Lucinda McCray Beier Livres

Focusing on the transition of health responsibilities from informal community settings to professional medical institutions, the book analyzes the interplay of gender, class, and cultural factors in three English communities from 1880 to 1970. Through 239 oral history interviews and public health reports, it explores how working-class health culture evolved alongside official healthcare services, highlighting the significant societal shifts in managing illness, birth, and death during the mid-twentieth century.

Lucinda McCray Beier's remarkable book, first published in 1987, enters the world of illness in seventeenth-century England, exploring what it was like to be either a sufferer or a healer. A wide spectrum of healers existed, ranging between the housewife, with her simple herbal preparations, local cunning-folk and bonestters, travelling healers, and formally accredited surgeons and physicians. Basing her study upon personal accounts written by sufferers and healers, Beier examines the range of healers and therapies available, describes the disorders people suffered from, and indicates the various ways sufferers dealt with their ailments. She includes several case-studies of healers and sufferers, and looks in detail at the ways in which women's identities and duties were associated with childbirth, illness and healing. This title will be of interest to students of history.