BOOKS, PAMPHLETS BY DATE OF PUBLICATION Authored

BOOKS, PAMPHLETS BY DATE OF PUBLICATION

Authored

Roy Porter. The making of geology: earth science in Britain, 1660-1815.

Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge & New York 1977. Reprinted with corrections 1980.

‘… I wish to argue that attitudes towards the Earth and its investigation underwent great transformation in Britain between the mid-seventeenth and the early nineteenth century.

The labours of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided the basis – material and conceptual – for the unquestioned flowering of geology in the nineteenth, not, as was claimed [by early nineteenth-century geologists], an obstacle to be demolished before progress could be made … At the beginning of my period, men saw the Earth through various heterogeneous traditions of discourse. By its end, some practised “geology” … I shall concentrate on the manner in which this occurred – that the science was made … in some respects more conspicuously made than many other sciences. It is recent. It relies upon other, antecedent, sciences … this book’s aim is to show how something like a “critical mass” of those interested in the Earth grew up, forging the necessary techniques, conceptions of Nature, critical standards, collections, publications and such like; none of which singly, but all of which together created the science, and launched it into selfsustained growth … It is offered as a contribution to grasping some central problems in the relationship of science to Western culture, and the emergence of modern patterns of thought

… I should be delighted if it helped historians in general to see that the history of science is continuous with their own economic, social, political and intellectual history, though with certain distinctive historical features …’

Roy Porter. English society in the eighteenth century.

The Pelican social history of Britain.

Allen Lane, London 1982. Revised edition published by Penguin, Harmondsworth 1990.

Japanese translation 1996.

‘… the eighteenth century marked a distinctive moment in the making of modern England.

Its society was capitalist, materialist, market-oriented; its temper worldly, pragmatic, responsive to economic forces. Yet its political institutions and its distributions of wealth and power were unashamedly inegalitarian, hierarchical, hereditary and privileged. Economic activity took place on a human scale (though often it did not bear a human face); change generally occurred at a pace people could adapt to; custom still enjoyed great authority; and deep-rooted localism, grounded on community loyalties, shaped what remained a “face-toface society”. All this was possible because people were not breathing down each other’s necks, for by our standards England was – in 1700 and still, though less so, in 1800 – empty.’

Roy Porter. The earth sciences: an annotated bibliography.

Garland, New York & London

1983.

‘… I have taken the history of geology in a broad sense, to include a wide range of scientific inquiries into the nature and history of the Earth … In my selection there is a bias toward the great age of the growth of geology, from about the mid-eighteenth century to the last third of the nineteenth; and toward the work of geologists of the chief Western languages (although both biases also reflect the state of the literature) … “Geology” as an organized discipline is but two hundred years old, and it is unwise and anachronistic to distinguish its history too rigidly from the development of cognate disciplines such as mineralogy, geography and crystallography. I have included brief sections on disciplines such as geophysics and natural history since their connections with geology were historically close and important. I have also included items exploring the social causes and consequences of geological inquiry

(especially economic and applied geology). Historians of science have been taking the cultural milieu of the investigation of Nature more seriously over the last decades, and this is beginning to show in the scholarship in this field, as it always has shown in scholarly interest in the historical relations between geology and religion …’

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Roy Porter. The history of medicine: past, present and future.

Institutionen för idé-och lärdomshistoria, Uppsala universitet. Uppsala 1983.

Roy Porter. A social history of madness: stories of the insane.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson,

London 1987. Reprinted in paperback 1989. Portugese edition published as Uma história social da loucuro.

Jorge Zahar, Rio de Janeiro 1990. Italian edition published as Storia sociale della follia.

Garzanti, Milan 1991. Reprinted in English by Phoenix, London 1996.

‘What is it like to be mad? This book explores the … thoughts and feelings of a number of mad people from earlier centuries, primarily making use of their own autobiographical writings … I wish to explore what mad people meant to say, what was on their minds. Their testimonies are eloquent of their hopes and fears, the injustices they suffered, above all of what it was like to be mad or to be thought to be mad … My points of reference, therefore, are language, history and culture. The writings of the mad can be read not just as symptoms of diseases or syndromes, but as coherent communications in their own right. Psychiatric doctors have commonly denied intelligibility to madness … They often portrayed insanity as irrational, as nonsense … The eternal joke in the history of lunacy involves a series of variations on the theme that madmen and mad-doctors switch identities and are impossible to tell apart. And it seems to me that in many of the encounters between “mad people” and their doctors which I shall examine … Alexander Cruden and Dr Monro, John Perceval and

Dr Fox, Daniel Schreber, Dr Weber, Freud … common humanity and often common sense perhaps lie squarely on the side of the mad. But my intention in this is not to add the guns of history to the anti-psychiatry broadside. Rather it is to show how psychiatry has itself formed part of a common consciousness. The mad and the mad-doctors are often saying intriguingly comparable things … with hindsight – or perhaps with distance, but certainly with sympathy – we can see how much sense the voices of the mad commonly made, in the desperate attempts of isolated, troubled and confused people to grasp their actual situations, their own urges, impulses, memories. They form the struggles of the despairing and powerless to exercise some control over those – devils, spooks, mad-doctors, priests – who had them in their power …’

Roy Porter. Disease, medicine and society in England, 1550-1860.

Prepared for the

Economic History Society. Macmillan Education, London 1987. Second edition published by Macmillan Press, Basingstoke 1993. Second edition published by Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge & New York 1995.

‘This survey examines the social history of the impact of disease upon English people and of their responses to it, both lay and medical. Its chronology, roughly 1550-1860, spans early modern times and the first century of industrial society; this allows questions to be asked both about continuing traditions and about change (eg. the effect of the Industrial Revolution upon the people’s health). It broaches some issues which are primarily demographic, by asking what part disease and medicine played in population changes. It touches upon economic history, by examining the changing wealth and market power of the medical profession. And it asks some questions best answered by the administrative or political historian (what role did the state play in promoting public health?). But it is not chiefly any of these – nor, above all, is it a reassessment of the roots of the welfare state or of the National

Health Service. Rather its main concern is with how people responded to sickness and to the threat of death – socially, religiously, medically. How relations changed between the people at large and the medical profession is central to that story …’

Roy Porter. Mind-forg’d manacles: a history of madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. Athlone, London 1987. Published by Penguin, London 1990.

‘… There is much to be said about mad people, and how they were regarded and treated in

England before the nineteenth century. Who were they? Were they hailed, hated, or harassed? How and why did the handling of mentally abnormal people change? … I have principally attempted to weave the information and insights already available in printed

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sources into a more comprehensive interpretation, highlighting the intimate yet complex relationships between lunacy, literature and the law, between mad-people, madhouses and mad-doctors, between attitudes and action, society and psychiatry … During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries madness was an extremely broad sociocultural category, with many manifestations and meanings. Madness could be seen as medical, or moral, or religious, or, indeed, Satanic. It could be sited in the mind or the soul, in the brain or the body. It could be good or bad … One of the key tasks of this book is to map these meanings of madness, to show how such meanings were disputed and negotiated, and to analyse the ideological implications they carried. These configurations changed markedly during the century and a half under consideration; and the book sets out to explore what brought about such changes: political pressures, reorientations of religious temper, new philosophies of mind and medical researches … I do not believe that in this period (unlike perhaps later) these changing attitudes and practices towards the disturbed (and the disturbing) overwhelmingly stemmed from the medical profession. Hence doctors are neither the heroes nor the villains of my story …’

Roy Porter. Edward Gibbon: making history.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1988.

Roy Porter. Health for sale: quackery in England, 1660-1850.

Manchester University Press,

Manchester & New York 1989. Reprinted as Quacks: fakers and charlatans in English medicine.

Tempus, Stroud 2000.

‘… quacks will be my shorthand (and morally neutral) term of art for those who drummed up custom largely through self-orchestrated publicity; who operated as individual entrepreneurs rather than as cogs in the machine of the medical community; whose dealings with their clients were largely one-off; and who depended heavily upon vending secret nostrums … few scholars have chosen to champion the quacks, and the result is that we know little about them. In terms of rectifying such ignorance, the present books is more a palliative than a panacea; it may at least purge some of the ancient errors that plague the subject … the time seemed ripe for a provisional overview and interpretation: something useful, amusing even.

I have not attempted to explore all facets of quackery. I have said next to nothing about the manufacture, ingredients, and efficacy of their electuaries and essences, balms, boluses and bitters. Nor have I made any attempt to evaluate their healing skills, or want of them, though this would be fruitful in the light of the Regency social commentator Henry Angelo’s comment that quacks were men of “much ingenuity … who, though not of regular practice, yet introduced many new and beneficial modes of alleviating and even curing diseases”.

Rather, the question this book chiefly tackles concerns the changing public identity and standing of the quack, as the branch of the medical profession openly, and sometimes unashamedly, making a living out of what Beddoes called “the sick-trade”.’

Roy Porter. The Enlightenment.

Macmillan Education, Basingstoke 1990. German edition published as Kleine Geschichte der Aufklärung.

Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 1991. Second edition published by Palgrave, Basingstoke 2001.

‘The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was one of the most exciting and significant currents of European culture. Battling against tyranny, ignorance and superstition, it formulated the ideals which still inform our society today: a belief in reason, criticism, freedom of thought, religion and expression, the value of science, the pursuit of progress. Enlightenment thinkers undermined the ancien régime and provided the ideas for the French Revolution.

Yet the Enlightenment was not a simple, unified movement. As recent scholarship has shown, its leading lights – thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, Rousseau and Kant – differed widely amongst themselves. Priorities changed during the course of the century,

Enlightenment religious outlooks and political campaigns varied from nation to nation.

Furthermore, the rosy view of the Enlightenment can no longer be accepted. It had its dark side, often supporting absolutism and holding the masses in contempt. And it had its doubts: was civilization after all true progress? Or should we attempt to recover the state of nature? This book … sympathetically explores all these complexities of the Enlightenment.

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Synthesizing and evaluating modern scholarship, if offers a new and comprehensive vision of this many-faceted movement.’

Roy Porter. Doctor of society: Thomas Beddoes and the sick trade in late Enlightenment

England.

Routledge, London 1991.

Roy Porter. London: a social history.

Hamish Hamilton, London 1994. Published by

Penguin, London 1996. Reprinted by Penguin, London 2000.

Roy Porter. The rise and fall of London’s town centres: lessons for the future.

Vision for

London, London 1996. Report of the 3 rd

Annual Vision for London Lecture 21 June 1995.

‘This essay is not about plans or prophecies. I’m a historian and historians make rotten prophets. History’s job is to remind us of what was, so as to show us what might be. That great Londoner, William Blake, was a prophet. He had a vision:

“The fields from Islington to Marylebone

To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood

Were builded over with pillars of gold

And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.”

If we are in the business of inventing tomorrow’s New Jerusalems, golden pillars might be nice as Blakean symbols of the visionary spirit that must energise our Millennium plans.

However, my priority would not be to go for gold; but rather first to try to rekindle Charles

Lamb’s “local attachments” …’

Roy Porter. The greatest benefit to mankind: a medical history of humanity from antiquity to the present.

HarperCollins, London 1997. Published by Fontana Press, London 1999.

Published in German as Die Kunst des Heilens: Eine medizinische Geschichte der

Menschheit von der Antike bis heute . Mit einem Geleitwort von Dietrich von Engelhardt.

Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg/Berlin 2000. (Roy was awarded the Historische

Sachbuchpreis 2001/2002 for this publication).

‘… This book will explore diseases, patients and physicians, and their interrelations, concentrating on some more than others … It sets the history of medical thinking and medical practice at stage centre. It concentrates on medical ideas about disease, medical teachings about healthy and unhealthy bodies, and medical models of life and death … I devote prime attention to those people and professional groups who have been responsible for such beliefs and practices – that is healers understood in a broad sense. This book is principally about what those healers have done, individually and collectively, and the impact of their ideas and actions … I discuss disease from a global viewpoint; no other perspective makes sense … Nevertheless, I devote most attention to what is called “western” medicine, because western medicine has developed in ways which have made it uniquely powerful and led it to become uniquely global … its dominance has increased because it is perceived, by societies and the sick, to “work” uniquely well, at least for many major classes of disorders … Whereas most traditional healing systems have sought to understand the relations of the sick person to the wider cosmos and to make readjustments between individual and world, or society and world, the western medical tradition explains sickness principally in terms of the body itself – its own cosmos … Medicine has offered the promise of “the greatest benefit to mankind”, but not always on terms palatable to and compatible with cherished ideals. Nor has it always delivered the goods … the prominence of medicine has lain only in small measure in its ability to make the sick well. This was always true, and remains so today … The particular powers of medicine, and the paradoxes which its rationales generate, are what this book is about …’

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Roy Porter. Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world.

Allen Lane, The

Penguin Press, London 2000. Revised and reprinted in paperback by Penguin,

Harmondsworth 2001. Published in the USA as The creation of the modern world: the untold story of the British Enlightenment. Norton, New York 2000.

‘I find enlightened minds congenial: I savour their pithy prose, and feel more in tune with those warm, clubbable men than with, say, the aggrieved Puritans who enthral yet appal

Christopher Hill or with Peter Gay’s earnestly erotic Victorians. I trust, however, that this book will be read as a work of analysis rather than one of advocacy or apology. The

Enlightenment is not a good thing or a bad thing … heroes-and-villains judgementalism would be absurd, because, as I shall insist ad nauseam , there never was a monolithic

“Enlightenment project”. Enlightened thinkers were broad-minded, they espoused pluralism, their register was ironic rather than dogmatic … Tolerance was central, and protagonists could shake hands on some matters while shaking fists on others …Avoiding taking sides, this book strives to make sense of what moved progressive intellectuals by laying bare their thinking, in the light of Locke’s dictum that we must understand a thinker’s terms, “in the sense he uses them, and not as they are appropriated, by each man’s particular philosophy, to conceptions that never entered the mind” of that author … John Locke championed the natural freedom of mankind, yet “The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina”, framed by him in 1669, granted free men in the new colony absolute jurisdiction over their slaves. Bentham deplored the criminalization of homosexuality, yet proposed castrating rapists and tattooing convicts … Mary Wollstonecraft vindicated the rights of women, but out-misogynized most women-haters … Far from judging saints and sinners, this book problematizes the progressives in the battle for the mind …’

Roy Porter. Science in the eighteenth century.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

2000.

Roy Porter. Bodies politic: disease, death and doctors in Britain, 1650-1900.

Reaktion,

London 2001. Published by Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY 2001.

‘This book arose out of a flash of professional awakening some years ago. Having been a historian all my working life, it dawned upon me that I had never seriously examined images or grappled with visual evidence ... I did not get far before being struck by the folly of even contemplating treating graphic evidence in splendid isolation from other kinds – a grotesque repetition of my earlier short-sightedness, on this time in reverse! The book takes a critical look at representations of the body in death, disease and health and at images of the healing arts in Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. The two key assumptions are that the human body is the chief signifier and communicator of all manner of meanings – religious, moral, political, and medical alike – and that pre-scientific medicine was an art which depended heavily on performance, ritual, rhetoric and theatre. It argues that great symbolic weight was attached to contrasting conceptions of the healthy and diseases body, and that such ideas were mapped onto antithetical notions of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. With these images in mind, it explores aspects of being ill alongside the practice of a range of medical specialities, paying particular attention to self-presentations by physicians, surgeons, quacks and others, and to changes in practitioners’ public identities over time. Using a wealth of outrageous anecdotes it discusses the wider metaphorical and symbolic meanings of disease and doctoring in Britain for the last 250 years.’

Roy Porter. Madmen: a social history of mad-houses, mad-doctors, and lunatics.

Tempus,

Stroud 2001.

Roy Porter. Blood and guts: a short history of medicine.

Penguin, Harmondsworth 2002.

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Roy Porter. Madness: a brief history.

Oxford University Press, Oxford 2002.

‘… In such a short book, I have focused on a few core questions: who has been identified as mad? What has been thought to cause their condition? And, what action has been taken to cure or secure them? … [Chapter 2] looks at madness understood as divine or demonic possession. Prevalent amongst pre-literate peoples the world over, such supernatural beliefs were then embodied in Mesopotamian and Egyptian medicine and in Greek myth and art … reformulated and authorized by the teachings of Christianity, they remained current in the West till the eighteenth century, though increasingly discounted by medicine and science. It is to the birth of medical science that Chapter 3 turns, examining the rational and naturalistic thinking about madness developed by Graeco-Roman philosophers and doctors and incorporated in the subsequent Western medical tradition. Lunacy and folly meanwhile became symbolically charged in art and literature: these cultural motifs and meanings of madness are explored in Chapter 4 … Chapter 5 proceeds to examine the drive to institutionalize the insane which peaked in the mid-twentieth century, when half a million people were psychiatrically detained in the USA and some 150,000 in the UK. The “new science” of the seventeenth century replaced Greek thinking with new models of body, brain, and disease: the early psychiatric theories and practices which derived from them form the core of Chapter 6. And the following chapter turns to psychiatry’s subjects: what did the insane themselves think and feel? How did they regard the treatment they received, so often against their will? The twentieth century has been widely called the “psychiatric century”, and … Chapter 8 is given over to its developments. Particular attention is given to one of its great innovations, the rise (and fall?) of psychoanalysis, and also to major innovations in treatments via surgery and drugs. Psychiatry’s standing as science and therapy at the dawn of the twenty-first century is then briefly assessed in the Conclusion: has its chequered history anything to tell us about the psychiatric enterprise at large? …’

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Co-authored

Roy Porter, Edward Royle. Documents of the early Industrial Revolution.

University of

Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate, Cambridge 1983.

‘This collection of primary sources on “The early Industrial Revolution” has been made in order to provide teachers and pupils studying the Cambridge Syndicate’s Advanced level

History syllabus on British History with an accessible and economical range of documents for one of the set topics for the examination. It thus follows the main areas of interest of that topic, which concentrates on reasons for and preconditions of industrial development in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain.’

Roy Porter, Dorothy Porter. In sickness and in health: the English experience, 1650-1850.

Fourth Estate, London 1988.

‘… Our aim in this book is to explore the cultures of health, sickness, and suffering produced by the high levels of morbidity and mortality experienced in Georgian England. We make no claim to contribute to historical epidemiology or demography, or to medico-historical geography … Nor is it our plan to survey medical provision in pre-modern England. We will say almost nothing about medical practitioners and practice … The subject of this book … is not medicine and doctors in society but sick people … we are concerned with perceptions of health and experience of sickness … Who was to blame for illness? What stigmas did particular diseases carry? … We are interested in people’s awareness of their own bodies, their organs and functions, the interplay of the mental and physical, of body and soul … How did right living go with healthiness, and health with holiness, but vice find its due punishment in sickness? … We shall investigate what people did – or failed to do – to preserve their health, and subsequently, how they responded to pain and disability. We aim to recreate their sense of the stages of life, and their responses when illness threatened foreclosure …

Powerful public prejudices – about nakedness, decency, order, bearing, and so forth – coloured the sense individuals made of being sick … We shall investigate how people identified, named and interpreted the ailments that afflicted them, how they explained their causes and meanings, and how they projected their courses – in many cases, of course, foreseeing and resigning themselves to inevitable death …

Roy Porter, Dorothy Porter . Patient’s progress: doctors and doctoring in eighteenth-century

England. Polity, Oxford 1989. Published in the USA as Patient’s progress: sickness, health and medical care in England, 1650-1850. Polity, Oxford 1989. Published in the USA as

Patient’s progress: sickness, health and medical care in England, 1650-1850. University of

California Press, Berkeley 1995.

‘It may be worth clarifying at the outset what kind of a work this is. It is not a history of medicine, nor even a social history of medicine, in the couple of centuries before Victorian professionalization and the birth of scientific medicine. It is, rather, an exploration of the relations between sick people and their doctors in the pre-modern era. We aim to show that the patients were the making of the doctors, and the doctors the making of the patients. It is this quasi-contractual symbiosis that we have attempted to analyse … the mind of the times

… What did the sick think about their doctors? How did doctors regard their patients? And we have attempted this analysis of an emergent culture largely through presentation and evaluation of first-hand attitudes and experiences, as recorded in letters, diaries, autobiographies and table-talk … this approach means that we concentrate almost wholly on the strata of society which left ample documentary remains of their opinions: that is, the urban middle classes and the “Quality” … It has, furthermore, been our practice in this book to lump together evidence from widely spaced decades. This has been a deliberate decision, for we believe that, in most salient respects, attitudes and practices did not fundamentally transform themselves in the generations under discussion: there was continuity over “la longue durée ”.’

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Sander L Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, George S Rousseau, Elaine Showalter. Hysteria beyond Freud.

University of California Press, Berkeley 1993.

‘Hysteria, it is often said, has disappeared this century, its problems solved by Freud, or its investigation discredited by the antics of Charcot … Yet hysteria was extraordinarily prominent in nineteenth-century medicine and culture. It posed in direct and personal form the key questions of gender and mind/body relations, and, as Henri Ellenberger has shown in his Discovery of the Unconscious , it formed the springboard for the discovery of the unconscious in psychoanalysis … Though we are in no sense whatever compiling a complete history of hysteria, we wanted to extend our gaze to cover European civilization over three thousand years, while simultaneously concluding our narrative with the launching of psychoanalysis from the base of medical hysteria as it was construed in the late nineteenth century. The Viennese founder of psychoanalysis was not the kingpin of a new province of hysteria … but the thinker best able to marshal the resources of an already rich kingdom that had seen itself rise and fall many times in the past … Our treatment weaves the real and the representative, especially when we launch into far-ranging discussions of the social history of hysteria. We want to replace existing notions with more accurate, less mythologized, and less heroic ones about Sigmund Freud … ‘

Lesley Hall, Roy Porter. The facts of life: the creation of sexual knowledge in Britain, 1650-

1950.

Yale University Press, New Haven 1995.

Lawrence I Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter, Andrew Wear . The Western medical tradition, 800 BC – 1800 AD.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York

1995.

Liz Fletcher, Roy Porter. A quest for the code of life: genome analysis at the Wellcome Trust

Genome Campus. The Wellcome Trust, London 1997.

‘In five short years, Hinxton Hall in Cambridgeshire has been transformed from a run-down country estate into one of the world’s leading centres of genome analysis – the Wellcome

Trust Genome Campus. This books tells the remarkable story of the Genome Campus – from the early days when researchers toiled round the clock in makeshift laboratories, to its official opening in October 1997. It covers both the transformation of the site and the people who made it happen. It chronicles the life and work of the Wellcome Trust’s founder, Sir

Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), without whose far-sighted beneficence the Genome Campus would never have been built. And it explores the science behind the Human Genome

Project – a venture poised to revolutionize both our understanding of human life and our approach to healthcare in the next millennium …’

Jonathan Andrews, Asa Briggs, Roy Porter, Penny Tucker, Keir Waddington. The history of

Bethlam, 1247-1993.


‘… Now seven hundred and fifty years old … Bethlam is not simply Europe’s oldest psychiatric establishment; it is the most famous – or, what for long amounted to the same thing, the most notorious … it is arguably only the name of Bethlam that has actually been turned into everyday speech and become part of a national culture. In English parlance

“Bedlam” – as in “Bethlam mad” or later expressions like “utter bedlam” – was becoming, from around Shakespeare’s time, detached from the institution and assuming a life and a persona of its own, with connotations of turmoil, confusion and cacophony … For over a century, Bethlam was one of the sights of London on any serious tourist’s itinerary, along with the Tower and Westminster Abbey … Yet, despite the fact that British psychiatry without

Bethlam is like Hamlet without the mad prince, Bethlam has remained essentially ignored …

Bethlam was not, of course, founded as a lunatic asylum. During its first century [1247-

1347] it had no deranged people at all … since around 1850 Bethlam has in most ways integrated itself within the British psychiatric world, yet … while many public institutions were growing huge, housing thousands of patients, Bethlam stayed very small indeed … [it] was

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often conspicuous in its attempts to be distinctive from and independent of other institutions

… in an age in which many institutions have closed down, Bethlam is very much alive and well – and growing. There are clichés about Bethlam which may be confirmed by the research set out in this book; but few stereotypes about asylums in general apply to Bethlam

… This book focuses on the institution itself and how it operated, as well as on the dialogue between institution and image. It thus inaugurates a proper historical analysis of the institution … Our aim is neither to apply a coat of whitewash nor to paint it black; it is to show what has made one particular institution live and assume a series of personalities.’

Roy Porter, George S Rousseau. Gout: the patrician malady.

Yale University Press, New

Haven & London 1998.

‘… why a book about gout? Is that not (one anticipates the objections) a rather trifling condition? … Wasn’t it, surely, a disease of the ancien régime and the Old World? Didn’t the idle and licentious bring it upon their own heads, or rather feet, by outrageous overindulgence, while they shrugged off responsibility by the solemn palaver of dignifying their condition as “the gout”, as if it were some boon companion or noble foe …? … Gout has been, and remains, a major cause of human suffering (it felt, remarked Sydney Smith,

“like walking on my eyeballs”), and for that reason it is worthy of attention. Yet it is also, as this book explores, an intriguing example of a malady whose very specification has been marked out with medical, cultural and social meanings. Gout early acquired a personality.

Most spectacularly, gout’s ascribed characteristics have been associated with the great and their glamour … gout has traditionally hobnobbed in high society … Gout thus affords a valuable opportunity to trace the use of illness as insignia … the links between gout and greatness run deeper, for it has often been maintained that gout goes with genius. Such beliefs tell us about the privileges and penalties of pre-eminence within a Christian moral scheme that took suffering as a mark not just of sin but of superiority, sanctity and spirituality. The story of gout thus throws light on philosophies of disease-meaning and distribution: who falls sick, who gets which disease, and why … Was gout to be envisaged as an occasional event … or was it an underlying fate (being gouty), or was it a disease in the sense of a causal agent? Was it an injury to the body, or a bodyguard, the system’s attempt to expel a threat? … Old ideas about gout cannot, however, be understood in isolation from wider belief systems; and in certain respects the models and metaphors buoying up those beliefs have continued to shape scientific theories in the twentieth century: much vintage metaphysical port has been poured into new scientific bottles …’

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Edited and co-edited

Ludmilla J Jordanova, Roy Porter (eds ). Images of the earth: essays in the history of the environmental sciences.

British Society for the History of Science, Chalfont St Giles 1979.

2 nd

updated edition published by British Society for the History of Science, Oxford 1997.

‘… Our purpose here is not to give an account of the history of the history of geology.

Rather it is to indicate some major landmarks in the development of the subject in order to place the present volume in its context and to suggest avenues for further research … use of the term “geology” is seriously misleading. We prefer to think of our subject matter as the history of systematic understanding of the earth. As a concept, “the earth” is conveniently loose and flexible. It refers not only to the ground beneath our feet which geologists examine, but also to the environment, even to our planet as a whole. Furthermore, it has played a major role in cosmological speculations in many cultures and … serves as one of the most powerful metaphors ever used … It is also clear that the history of the life sciences, of geography, and of the physical sciences … must be mentioned to show the extent to which they have influenced work in the history of geology … The first section, “Geology and belief”, offers reconsiderations on the theme which has been deeply controversial throughout the development of geology, that is, the relations of the science to belief … The second section, “The language and metaphor of nature”, focusses attention on … how conceptions and theories about the earth are conveyed through languages … The third section, “Geology and discipline boundaries”, investigates why study and interpretation of the natural environment came to be broken down into distinct, specialist sciences … The last section,

“The social history of geology”, contains two pioneering essays … [which] show the inability

– before the insight of William Smith – to convert knowledge [of the scientific study of the earth] into guidelines of economic value to mining enterprises, and [which] lays some queries against prevailing interpretations of the institutions most connected with early nineteenth-century British geology … Much work, conceptual and empirical, is still to be done. For it remains a deplorable fact, how little historians have understood the myriad meanings for the human race of its own planet.’ (Taken from the 1997 edition)

George S Rousseau, Roy Porter (eds ). The ferment of knowledge: studies in the historiography of eighteenth-century science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge &

New York 1980.

William F Bynum, E Janet Browne, Roy Porter (eds). Dictionary of the history of science.

Macmillan, London 1981. Reprinted 1983.

William Hobbs. ‘The earth generated and anatomized.’ An early eighteenth century theory of the earth.

Edited with an introduction by Roy Porter. British Museum (Natural History),

London 1981. Published by Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY 1981.

Roy Porter, Mikulá_ Teich (eds). The Enlightenment in national context.

Cambridge

University Press, Cambridge & New York 1981.

Roy Porter (ed). Dizionario biografico della storia della medicina e delle scienze naturali.

4 volumes. Franco Maria Ricci, Milan 1985-1988.

Roy Porter (ed and introduction ). Patients and practitioners: lay perceptions of medicine in pre-industrial society. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York 1985.

‘We have histories of diseases but not of health, biographies of doctors but not of the sick …

The aim of this book is to show that the sick in past time constitute important subjects of historical study … the essays in this volume explore different aspects of consciousness of sickness, and of actual experiences of being ill, in pre-industrial society (chiefly, in fact, in

25

seventeenth and eighteenth century England), concentrating on lay beliefs about health and illness, lay self-medication, and lay relations with the various types of medical practice and treatment on offer … One theme emerging prominently from this collection is the intertwining in past time of sickness experiences and religious experiences … Our overall grasp of medicine’s social relations is patchy … One thing seems clear, however. Patient/doctor relations in early modern England probably had more resemblance to those characteristic of classical antiquity – ones surviving thereafter, in muted forms, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance – than to current norms and structures … We believe we have resisted the temptation of conjuring up a nostalgic, Rousseauvian myth of a medical world we have lost –

… in which there was less sickness, people coped with it better, or suffered more nobly, and the medical profession hadn’t medicalized life or planted anxiety and iatrogenic disorders … we should hardly need telling – that before scientific medicine sickbeds were no beds of roses … Our investigations suggest it would be quite false to draw sharp boundaries between lay and professional outlooks, oral and literate cures, folk and learned therapeutics

… The stories of the sick deserve to be heard … In making and breaking individual lives and social ties, in shaping a sense of the self, sickness was one of life’s dominating threats and key experiences. It is the hope of the volume to open eyes more fully to its historical importance.’

William Bynum, Roy Porter, Michael Shepherd (eds). The anatomy of madness: essays in the history of psychiatry.

3 volumes. Vol 1 - People and ideas. Vol 2 – Institutions and society. Vol 3 – The asylum and its psychiatry. Tavistock Publications, London & New York

1985.

‘… The essays in this volume (1) explore key issues about insanity and how it was conceptualized … two orthodoxies run deeply entrenched through the scholarship, nudging us towards particular readings of how the modern psycho-sciences actually did take shape.

One concerns what they superseded, the other what precipitated them; or, in other words, one is about the relations of insanity and psychiatry first with Christianity and then subsequently with secularization; the other is about their links to the scientific revolution, and the renderings of mind postulated by the mechanical philosophy …’

‘… The value of the essays in this volume (2) lies particularly in the variety of new empirical detail which they present … Although the heyday of the asylum may be past, it continues to occupy the centre stage in much historical writing, because of its crucial links with the development of the psychiatric profession in the nineteenth century. Throughout Europe and

North America, asylums were public institutions, funded by public money and thereby fusing an alliance between the state and the profession from the latter’s earliest formative period.

The other major point of intersection has been between the profession and the law, and at this juncture, too, historical analysis has proved an important constituent of contemporary debate …’

… The essays in this volume (3) … coalesce around not so much the rise and fall of psychiatry as its successive hopes and fears. The institution of the asylum concentrated the new discipline, but necessarily led to the emergence of a wider psycho-politics concerned with the very place of abnormality within society and confined by it. And in turn institutional psychiatry generated new insights into the general functioning of the human mind which broke down the very divide between the normal and the insane which the asylum had originally helped to institute …’

William F Bynum, Roy Porter (eds). William Hunter and the eighteenth-century medical world.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985.

‘For too long William Hunter has been eclipsed in the historical record by his brother John …

William [was] a more enigmatic man, indeed; one who, despite his enormous success and rise to fame and riches; despite his notable anatomy school and his thousands of grateful pupils, clearly cut an ambitious figure in his own times (almost none of his medical colleagues attended his funeral) and failed to capture the imagination of succeeding generations of surgeons and obstetricians, or provide them with a serviceable icon to

26

worship and ideal to emulate. Significantly the Hunterian Society commemorates John, not

William … In [the fields of] medical education, the advancement of surgery, the cultural standing of the medical profession, the particular significance for women’s history of the male doctor-female patient relationship in obstetrics and gynaecology, William Hunter’s importance has been recognised, but only in a rather shadowy way. There are perhaps three important reasons for this. First, there has been a simple lack of information about his life and works … Second, Hunter does not really fit into the stereotypes of the medical man or medical scientist with which medical historians commonly work …The third reason … is that so much of the background fine texture of eighteenth-century medicine remains to be explored …’

Roy Porter, Sylvana Tomaselli (eds). Rape.

Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986. Reprinted in paperback as Rape: an historical and cultural enquiry.

Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1989.

Roy Porter, Mikulá_ Teich (eds). Revolution in history.

Cambridge University Press,

Cambridge & New York 1986.

‘[This book sets out] to show the strengths and weaknesses of historians’ concepts of revolution in fields as diverse as economic history, the development of the visual arts, and power politics … On the one hand, the concept has increasingly been overworked, debased and almost done to death. By a process of the inflation of historians’ vocabulary, what formerly might have been termed a “shift”, or a “change”, becomes a “revolution” … On the other hand, so many of the great revolutions of the traditional historical canon – the French

Revolution, the Industrial Revolution – have been subjected to withering factual, conceptual and terminological scrutiny …Many of these essays pose the question of wherein precisely lies the revolutionariness of certain dramatic transformations ... Is it with the great inventions

… or do we find that other, more subtle transformations, involving social relations as well as machines, are the ones that truly deserve the term revolutionary? Or … might there be certain levels of history in which the vocabulary of revolution is almost certainly bound to prove misleading, except perhaps with very special connotations, as in the idea of a “long revolution”? …Lastly, in putting forward positive suggestions for the role of the concept of revolution and the interpretation of revolution as a historical force, the contributors consider the dynamic interconnections of phenomena which acquire the character of a revolution, occurring in different spheres … We live in confused times, but times in which change has more and more revolutionary consequences for us. Only if we can appreciate the diverse, subtle, yet essential nature of revolution in the course of our history, will we have the insight and courage to confront and contribute to the transformations of our own times.’

Roy Porter (ed and introduction). Man masters nature: 25 centuries of science.

BBC Books,

London 1987.

‘If science is the knowledge of, and power to control Nature, then all societies have possessed science. Without some grasp of the orderly cycle of the seasons and the climatic changes accompanying them, of the habits of animals and the properties of basic materials, of what makes people sick or strong, no tribe, even the most “primitive”, could ever have survived. Some societies, however, have transformed such hard-won experience into system, into theory, into bodies of truth, which satisfy the human need to understand as well as to act … Yet there is something unique about Western science … first systematised by the Greeks, revitalised by the Renaissance, revolutionised by the so-called “New Science” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and advancing at an astonishing rate ever since …

What has made Western science so successful? That is a key question behind this book …

The keynotes are unity and comprehensiveness … Because of this fascination with unity and wholeness, it comes as no surprise that so many of the master scientists have possessed a powerful aesthetic, mystical, or religious sense of the harmony of the cosmos, or of Divine Creation … Scientists are children of their times, and new science emerges – as did Napoleon – only when the time is ripe … new facts are discovered which generate anomalies that can’t be absorbed in the existing conceptual frameworks … New outlooks in

27

theology, philosophy, or in aesthetics, new perceptions of man and his mission, have always created fresh problems and opened up new perspectives for scientists … The great scientist is not the man isolated from his age, but one so enmeshed with it that he changes it …

Science’s capacity to change mankind’s moral and social perceptions is no less. So the great questions of science’s future – how can it best be advanced? Can science be directed or must if be free to follow its nose? If we leave science free, how will it be accountable? – are questions for us all. Understanding science’s past, will help us create its best future.’

William F Bynum, Roy Porter (eds). Medical fringe and medical orthodoxy, 1750-1850.

Croom Helm, London 1987.

‘… if it generally accepted that regular and irregular medicine have dialectically interacted within the larger social whole, it is curious how each continues to be studied on its own … the dozen contributors [to this book] have provided a series of studies examining how the relations between regular and irregular medicine have been constituted in particular fields at particular times. In some cases, they complement each other, and their relations are amicable; in others, there is deep conflict … arguably, it was the hundred years covered by this book … that saw the emergence of the familiar distinction between regular and fringe medicine … the medical historian surveying the eighteenth-century scene can point to certain practitioners who had society’s approval stamped on to pieces of paper: these were university graduates, or members or licentiates of the various medical colleges … But such men (and all of them, with the exception of a number of licensed midwives, were men) amounted to only a relatively small percentage even of those who would have popularly been regarded as regular practitioners, let alone of all the people who … were engaged in healing the sick. Most practising surgeons and apothecaries held no public certificate … the essays in this book are not just about the positioning and nature of the divide between medical orthodoxy and medical fringe, but are about its very creation, or at least the crystallisation of it as part of the public domain of medicine … Above all, this book enters a plea against historical fragmentation. It could make for bad history if all orthodox medical historians studied orthodox medicine, while social, radical and labour historians studied the history of the “fringe” … They must be studied in their mutual, dynamic relations, as a whole…’

Roy Porter, Andrew Wear (eds). Problems and methods in the history of medicine.

Croom

Helm, London 1987.

George S Rousseau, Roy Porter (eds). Sexual underworlds of the Enlightenment.

Manchester University Press, Manchester 1987.

Peter Burke, Roy Porter (eds). The social history of language.



Thomas Trotter. An essay, medical, philosophical, and chemical on drunkenness and its effects on the human body.

First published 1804. Edited with an introduction by Roy Porter.

Routledge, London & New York 1988.

William F Bynum, Roy Porter (eds). Brunonianism in Britain and Europe.

Medical History

1988; Supplement 8. Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London.

John Haslam. Illustrations of madness.

First published 1810. Edited with an introduction by

Roy Porter. Routledge, London 1988. Published as Politiquement fou: James Tilly

Matthews. Edited by Roy Porter, D Williams.

EPEL, Paris 1996.

Roy Porter, Mikulá_ Teich (eds). Romanticism in national contex.

Cambridge University


28

Roy Porter, Sylvana Tomaselli (eds). The dialectics of friendship.

Routledge, London &

New York 1989.

Lindsay Granshaw, Roy Porter (eds). The hospital in history.

Routledge, London & New

York 1989.

George S Rousseau, Roy Porter (eds). Exoticism in the Enlightenment.

Manchester

University Press, Manchester 1990.

Roy Porter, Mikulá_ Teich (eds). Fin de siècle and its legacy.



Dorothy K Auyong, Dorothy Porter, Roy Porter (compilers ). Consumption and culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a bibliography.

The UCLA Center for 17 th

and 18 th

Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles 1991.

George Cheyne: the English malady (1733).

Edited with an introduction by Roy Porter.


Peter Burke, Roy Porter (eds). Language, self, and society: a social history of language.

Polity Press, Cambridge 1991.

William F Bynum, Roy Porter (eds). Living and dying in London. Medical History 1991;

Supplement 11. Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London.

John Yolton, Pat Rogers, Roy Porter, Barbara Maria Stafford (eds). The Blackwell companion to the Enlightenment. Blackwell, Oxford 1991. Published in paperback 1995 and reprinted 1996.

Roy Porter (ed). The Faber book of madness.

Faber & Faber, London 1991. Reprinted in paperback 1993.

Roy Porter, Mikulá_ Teich (eds). The Renaissance in national context.

Cambridge


William F Bynum, Stephen Lock, Roy Porter (eds ). Medical journals and medical knowledge: historical essays. Routledge, London & New York 1992.

Roy Porter (ed). Myths of the English.


Roy Porter (ed). The popularization of medicine, 1650-1850.

Routledge, London & New

York 1992.

Roy Porter, Mikulá_ Teich (eds). The scientific revolution in national context.

Cambridge


William F Bynum, Roy Porter (eds). Companion encylopedia of the history of medicine.

2 volumes. Routledge, London & New York 1993. Reprinted 1994. Reprinted 1994, 2001.

Published in paperback 1997.

John Brewer, Roy Porter (eds). Consumption and the world of goods.

Routledge, London

1993. New edition published 1994.

Dorothy Porter, Roy Porter (eds). Doctors, politics and society: historical essays.

Rodopi,

Amsterdam & Atlanta 1993.

29

Marie Mulvey Roberts, Roy Porter (eds). Literature and medicine during the eighteenth century. Routledge, London & New York 1993.

William F Bynum, Roy Porter (eds). Medicine and the five senses.



Robert Baker, Dorothy Porter, Roy Porter (eds ). The codification of medical morality: historical and philosophical studies of the formalization of Western medical morality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 2 volumes. Vol 1 – Medical ethics and etiquette in the eighteenth century. Vol 2 – Anglo-American medical ethics and medical jurisprudence in the nineteenth century. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, London 1993.

Mikulá_ Teich, Roy Porter (eds). The national question in Europe in historical context.


Roy Porter (general editor). WH Brock. The Fontana history of chemistry . Fontana, London

1992. Published in the USA as The Norton history of chemistry.

WW Norton, New York

1993.

Roy Porter (general editor). Peter J Bowler. The Fontana history of the environmental sciences.

Fontana, London 1992. Published in the USA as The Norton history of the environmental sciences.

WW Norton, New York 1993. Reprinted as The earth encompassed: a history of the environmental sciences.

WW Norton, New York 2000.

‘Preface’ by Roy Porter.

Jeremy Black, Roy Porter (eds). A dictionary of eighteenth-century world history.

Blackwell,

Oxford 1994. Published as The Penguin dictionary of eighteenth century history.

Penguin,

London 1996. Reprinted by Penguin 2001.

‘… most students and general readers who consult this book, for some essential date or development will be concerned with mainstream European affairs: politics, wars, dynasties, the philosophes. This reflects deeply ingrained priorities – and not necessarily narrow or unreasonable ones at that – and we have striven hared to cater to the needs of such users.

But we have also tried, within strict space constraints, to go beyond that, by giving a fair amount of attentionb to world affairs – not just to colonialism but to the internal histories of

Africa, China and other great empires. And we have given a generous allotment to the life of the mind, to art, literature, music, ideas – to Mozart, Kant and Goya, to the Enlightenment and the novel, believing that the eighteenth century saw the rise of the Fourth Estate and the

March of Mind. And we have given attention to the basics of living (the family, elementary economic facts), and also to less tangible aspects of the attitudes and outlooks of the time.

The browsing reader will, we hope, find much to catch his or her interest …’

Mark S Micale, Roy Porter (eds). Discovering the history of psychiatry.

Oxford University

Press, New York & Oxford 1994.

Colin Jones, Roy Porter (eds). Reassessing Foucault: power, medicine, and the body.

Routledge, London & New York 1994. Reprinted 1998.

Roy Porter, Mikulá_ Teich (eds). Sexual knowledge, sexual science: the history of attitudes to sexuality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York 1994.

Roy Porter (consultant ed). The biographical dictionary of scientists.

Oxford University

Press, Oxford 1994.

30

Roy Porter (ed). The Hutchinson dictionary of scientific biography.

2 nd

edition. Helicon,

Oxford 1994. (Previously published as The biographical dictionary of scientists . 6 volumes,

1983-1985). 3 rd

edition published 2000, editors Roy Porter, Marilyn B Ogilvie.

Bob Scribner, Roy Porter, Mikulá_ Teich (eds). The Reformation in national context.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York 1994.

German E Berrios, Roy Porter (eds). A history of clinical psychiatry: the origin and history of psychiatric disorders. Athlone, London 1995.

Roy Porter, Mikulá_ Teich (eds). Drugs and narcotics in history.



Christopher Fox, Roy Porter, Robert Wokler (eds). Inventing human science: eighteenthcentury domains.

University of California Press, Berkeley 1995.

This book explores some of the issues involved with the creation of a science of man which was central to the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment. It includes explorations of the human place in nature; of medicine’s search for larger relations between health, disease and modes of life; of education and the new sense of human possibility; of the study of language; of economic and demographic thinking; and of psychology as a natural science.

Peter Burke, Roy Porter (eds). Languages and jargons: contributions to a social history of language.


Roy Porter (ed). Medicine in the Enlightenment.

Rodopi, Amsterdam & Atlanta 1995.

Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter (eds). The history of medical education in Britain.

Rodopi,

Amsterdam & Atlanta 1995.

Roy Porter, Marie Mulvey Roberts (eds). Pleasure in the eighteenth century.

Macmillan,

Basingstoke 1996.

Sarah Dunant, Roy Porter (eds). The age of anxiety.

Virago, London 1996.

Roy Porter (ed). The Cambridge illustrated history of medicine.


Press, Cambridge & New York 1996. Revised and reprinted in paperback 2001.

Mikulá_ Teich, Roy Porter (eds ). The industrial revolution in national context: Europe and the USA. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge & New York 1996.

Roy Porter (consultant ed). Peter Brookesmith . Future plagues: biohazard, disease and pestilence. Mankind’s battle for survival.

Blandford, London 1997.

Roy Porter (consultant ed ). Medicine, a history of healing: ancient traditions to modern practices. Michael O’Mara, London 1997.

Mikulá_ Teich, Roy Porter, Bo Gustafsson (eds). Nature and society in historical context.


Roy Porter (ed). Rewriting the self: histories from the Renaissance to the present.


Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Roy Porter (eds ). Cultures of psychiatry and mental health care in postwar Britain and the Netherlands.

Rodopi, Amsterdam 1998.

31

Kurt Bayertz, Roy Porter (eds). From physico-theology to bio-technology: essays in the social and cultural history of biosciences. A festschrift for Mikulá_ Teich.

Rodopi,

Amsterdam 1998.

John R Hinnells, Roy Porter (eds). Religion, health, and suffering.

Kegan Paul International,

London 1999.

Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Brian P Levack, Roy Porter (eds ). Withcraft and magic after the witch trials: the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Vol 5 in Athlone history of witchcraft and magic. Athlone, London 1999.

Ole P Grell, Roy Porter (eds). Toleration in Enlightenment Europe.


Press, Cambridge 2000.

Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Roy Porter (eds ). Cultures of neurasthenia from Beard to the First

World War.

Rodopi, Amsterdam & New York 2001.

Roy Porter (section ed). In Colin Blakemore, Sheila Jennett (eds ). The Oxford companion to the body.


32


Authored forthcoming titles

Roy Porter. Empire and after: Britain 1789-2000.

Penguin, Harmondsworth 2006.

Roy Porter. Flesh: Britain in the age of reason. Allen Lane, London 2002.

Roy Porter. From providence to progress: Britain 1600-1789.

Penguin, Harmondsworth

2004.

Edited and co-edited forthcoming titles

William F Bynum, Sharon Messenger, Roy Porter (eds). The Oxford dictionary of scientific quotations.


Geoff Hudson, Roy Porter (eds). Military medicine.

Rodopi, Amsterdam 2003.

Roy Porter, Helen Nicholson (eds). Georgina Weldon.


Roy Porter, David Wright (eds ). The confinement of the insane in the modern era: international perspectives, 1800-1965. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003.

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