This volume takes the approach that medicine is a social phenomenon with a biological basis and an intellectual content. While diseases, societies, and ideas can change independently of one another or concurrently, the conjuncture of the three is at the heart of medical practice. The essays included in this book explore the relationships between medicine and the society and time in which it was practiced.

The art of healing : learned medicine and popular medicine in the France of 1790 /Jean-Pierre Goubert -- Women, religion and medicine : the nuns who care in France in the nineteenth century / Jacques Léonard -- City and country in eighteenth-century medical discussions about early childhood / Marie-France Morel -- Roche, D. Talent, reason, and sacrifice. -- Work-related diseases of artisans in eighteenth-century France / Arlette Farge -- The structure of the hospital system in France in the ancien régime / Muriel Joerger -- Childbirth in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France / Mirielle Laget.