Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners in Eighteenth-Century London.

Cambridge:: Cambridge University Press, 1996., 1996. 8vo. [2], xiv, 390, [2] pp. Figs., index. Black gilt-stamped cloth, dust jacket. Ownership signature of Philip Wilson. Very good. ISBN: 0521363551 "Charitable Knowledge explores the interconnections between medical teaching, medical knowledge, and medical authority in eighteenth-century London. The metropolis lacked a university until the nineteenth century, so the seven major voluntary hospitals - St Bartholomew's, St Thomas's, Guy's, the Westminster, St George's, the Middlesex, and the London - were crucial sites for educating surgeons, surgeon-apothecaries, and visiting physicians. Lawrence explains how charity patients became teaching objects, and how hospitals became medical schools. She demonstrates that hospital practitioners gradually gained authority within an emerging medical community, transforming the old tripartite structure into a loosely unified group of de facto general practitioners dominated by hospital men. As hospital physicians and surgeons became the new elite, they profoundly shaped what counted as 'good' knowledge among medical men, both in the construction of clinical observations and in the proper use of science." – Cambridge University Press. "Susan C. Lawrence's culmination of a decade's worth of methodical and prodigious research into the cultural milieu of eighteenth-century London ‘hospital medicine' has been well worth the wait.' Philip K. Wilson, Times Higher Education Supplement ‘Lawrence's work is distinguished by its exhaustive approach to the careers and connections of the medical men who established the elite status of the London hospitals. Her approach is considerably more quantitative than many earlier writings on the hospitals, and the work is the more admirable in that it makes excellent sense of conventional reports which are frequently dry and uninformative when tackled simply as literary texts . . . impressive account." – Times Literary Supplement. Lawrence is at the University of Tennessee, Det. of History. She is especially interested in the history of medicine.