"Cultural Approaches to the History of Medicine: Mediating Medicine is a pioneering contribution to this new field of medical history which offers a careful reconstruction of the complex web of communications and re-configurations involved in the weave of medicine in the past.

The contributors are international scholars who explore issues as diverse as heart dissection, childbirth, masturbation, animal care, hermaphroditism, orthopaedics, 'miracle' drugs, smallpox and sex advice in different European cultures from the 1600s to the present day. But they all explore the role of mediation: how information about sickness was shaped and exchanged by various means ranging from hagiographies and almanacs to private letters and newspapers.

Mediation could achieve reconciliation in the encounter between a patient and a doctor or healer, but it could also be an instrument of authority and domination, or conversely, of resistance and liberation."--Jacket.