The Making of Addiction: The 'Use and Abuse' of Opium in Nineteenth-Century Britain (History of Medicine in Context)

What does drug addiction mean to us? What did it mean to others in the past? And how are these meanings connected? In modern society the idea of drug addiction is a given and commonly understood concept, yet this was not always the case in the past. This book uncovers the original influences that shaped the creation and the various interpretations of addiction as a disease, and of addiction to opiates in particular. It delves into the treatments, regimes, and prejudices that surrounded the condition, a newly emerging pathological entity and a form of 'moral insanity' during the nineteenth century. The source material for this book is rich and surprising. Letters and diaries provide the most moving material, detailing personal struggles with addiction and the trials of those who cared and despaired. Confessions of shame, deceit, misery and terror sit alongside those of deep sensual pleasure, visionary manifestations and blissful freedom from care. The reader can follow the lifelong opium careers of literary figures, artists and politicians, glimpse a raw underworld of hidden drug use, or see the bleakness of urban and rural poverty alleviated by daily doses of opium. Delving into diaries, letters and confessions this book exposes the medical case histories and the physician's mad, lazy, commercial, contemptuous, desperate, altruistic and frustrated attempts to deal with drug addiction. It demonstrates that many of the stigmatising prejudices arose from false 'facts' and semi-mythical beliefs and thus has significant implications, not only for the history of addiction, but also for how we view the condition today.

History

Foxcroft, Louise

Asia

Routledge

"At last, a book on dieting that is sensible, and better still, entertaining."—The Independent
Today we are urged from all sides to slim down and shape up, to shed a few pounds or lose life-threatening inches. The media's relentless obsession with size may be perceived as a twenty-first-century phenomenon, but as award-winning historian Louise Foxcroft shows, we have been struggling with what to eat, when, and how much ever since the Greeks and the Romans first pinched an inch.
Meticulously researched, surprising, and sometimes shocking, Calories and Corsets tells the epic story of our complicated relationship with food, the fashions and fads of body shape, and how cultural beliefs and social norms have changed over time. Combining research from medical journals, letters, articles, and the dieting bestsellers we continue to devour (including one by an octogenarian Italian in the sixteenth century), Foxcroft reveals the extreme and often absurd lengths people will go to in order to achieve the perfect body, from eating carbolic soap to chewing every morsel hundreds of times to a tasteless pulp.
This unique and witty history exposes the myths and anxieties that drive today's multi-billion dollar dieting industry—and offers a welcome perspective on how we can be healthy and happy in our bodies.
Louise Foxcroft has a PhD in the history of medicine from the University of Cambridge. Her book Hot Flushes, Cold Science was the winner of the 2009 Longman-History Today Prize.

Calories and Corsets: A history of dieting over 2,000 years

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Diets & Weight Loss

Profile Books

A powerful, taboo-shattering medical and social history that redresses the myths and delivers the truths about menopause Meticulously researched and always entertaining, this book traces the history of "the change of life" from its appearance in classical texts and the medical literature of the 18th century to up-to-the-minute contemporary clinical approaches. For more than 2,000 years, attitudes to menopause have created dread, shame, and confusion. Its progression from natural phenomenon to full-blown pathological condition led to bizarre treatments and often dangerous surgery, and formalized a misogyny which lingers in the treatment of menopausal women today. Delving into the archives, the boudoir, and the doctor's bag, this book reveals the elements that formed the menopause myth: chauvinism, collusion, trial, error, and secrecy. Absurd assumptions that have persisted through history are challenged here, such as the idea that sex stops at menopause, or that aging should be feared.

Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause

Women's Health

Granta UK

A powerful, taboo-shattering medical and social history that redresses the myths and delivers the truths about menopause Meticulously researched and always entertaining, this book traces the history of "the change of life" from its appearance in classical texts and the medical literature of the 18th century to up-to-the-minute contemporary clinical approaches. For more than 2,000 years, attitudes toward menopause have created dread, shame, and confusion. Its progression from natural phenomenon to full-blown pathological condition led to bizarre treatments and often dangerous surgery, and formalized a misogyny which lingers in the treatment of menopausal women today. Delving into the archives, the boudoir, and the doctor's bag, this book reveals the elements that formed the menopause myth: chauvinism, collusion, trial, error, and secrecy. Absurd assumptions that have persisted through history are challenged here, such as the idea that sex stops at menopause, or that aging should be feared.

Granta Books

Based on the personal journals of Robert Grenville Gayer-Anderson (1881–1945), Egyptologist, poet, surgeon, soldier, psychic, and noted collector, this candid and charming historical biography tells of Gayer-Anderson’s strange and eclectic life in the final days of the British empire. As a child, he crossed an unforgiving America with his entrepreneurial and eccentric Irish parents. As a man, he immersed himself in the Arab way of life as colonials seldom did; he saw ghosts and witches, sailed the Nile, wrestled Turks and crocodiles, fought at Gallipoli, smoked opium, performed surgery in the desert, gathered and cared for artefacts and boys in his Cairene home, survived an assassination attempt and, in the name of science and Henry Wellcome, in flowery glades he boiled the flesh from the skulls of Nuba warriors. His personal journals are filled with frank accounts of his exploits and of the illustrious and colorful people who wandered by: Lawrence of Arabia, Gordon, Kitchener, Conan-Doyle, Eric Gill, and Stephen Spender, among others. Drugs, race, class, family, sex, and selfhood are vividly mixed in this tale of two wars, colonial life, medicine, anthropology, and psychic phenomena. The stiff-upper-lipped ritual of a very British upbringing vied with his Romantic and consuming love of beauty, vividly embodied in the Gayer-Anderson Museum in Cairo, which to this day houses his vast collection of carpets, furniture, glassware, and other curios.

Gayer-Anderson: The Life and Afterlife of the Irish Pasha

Travel

Africa

The American University in Cairo Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Foxcroft, Louise. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Foxcroft, Louise

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Foxcroft, Louise. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Making of Addiction: The 'Use and Abuse' of Opium in Nineteenth-Century Britain (History of Medicine in Context)

The Making of Addiction: The 'Use and Abuse' of Opium in Nineteenth-Century Britain (History of Medicine in Context)

Calories and Corsets: A history of dieting over 2,000 years

Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause

Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause

Gayer-Anderson: The Life and Afterlife of the Irish Pasha