Under the direction of Professor John Brewer, the Center for 17th and 18th Century Studies and the Clark Library at UCLA have created an ambitious international programme to analyse the material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through its patterns of consumption. Focus on this period allows consideration of a world in which economic and political connections are becoming global, in which an unprecedented range of goods and services are on offer, and in which the old political structures are first subverted and then radically modified. The Age of Enlightenment is transmuted into the first Age of Consumption.The present volume, the first of three, is the result of a unique collaboration between twenty-six leading subject specialists from Europe and North America. The outcome is a new interpretation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one that shapes a new historical landscape based on the consumption of goods and services.

Trotter makes an important contribution to the understanding of alcoholism as a mental disease. Roy Porter considers the essay's conclusions in the context of Trotter's own life and mind.

Product Description: John Haslam’s Illustrations of Madness, written in 1810, occupies a special place in psychiatric history, it was the first book-length account of one single psychiatric case written by a British psychiatrist. John Haslam, apothecary to London’s Bethlem Hospital, and a leading psychiatrist of the early-nineteenth century, details the case of James Tilly Matthews, who had been a patient in the hospital for some ten years...read more

In this work, Roy Porter 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-17th to the 20th century.

Product Description: The Ultimate Theory of Everything and Other Misguided Thought Experiments will have you rethinking the concept of "Time" as we know it. It will also entertain you with some humorous ways of looking at some old and new ideas. In this book I ask YOU, the reader, if the "force" of "Time" itself can unite Physics, Gravity, Light, The Big Bang, Dark Matter, Field Propulsion, Anti-Gravity, Light, Red Shift of Light, Universal Expansion, Heat Physics, Magnetism, Curved Space, Black Holes and other ideas ? Could the theories put forth in this book be what Einstein and other Physicists have overlooked? Could this lead to a Final Theory, flying cars, field propulsion or more? I have no idea! These are just "thought experiments"! So far no one has ever proven or dis proven these ideas...read more

Product Description: [MP3-CD audiobook format in Vinyl case. NOTE: The MP3-CD format requires a compatible audio CD player.] [Read by Simon Vance] In this boldly drawn portrait of eighteenth-century England, Roy Porter defines a nation from its princes to its paupers, from its metropolis to its smallest hamlet...read more

Product Description: This set comprises two paperback volumes. The first volume, The Western Medical Tradition, 800BC-1800AD, examines the system of medical ideas that went back to the Greeks of the eighth century BC, and played a major role in the understanding and treatment of health and disease...read more

Product Description: FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY.

Product Description: Between the mid-seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century there developed in Britain a range of empirical and increasingly secular sciences concerned with the earth. This book presents a detailed account of how this development led to the creation of a complex socio-intellectual fabric of methods, ambitions, facts and ideas which took on the nature of a distinctive, self-sustaining discipline: 'geology'...read more

The original words announcing great scientific discoveries are collected in a comprehensive reference guide that includes full author descriptions, exact sources, and a word-finding index.

What was it like to be insane in the Georgian England of Mary Wollstonecraft and Coleridge? Indeed, how was the most famous mad person of the century—Shelley’s “old, mad, blind, despised king” George III—treated before his final descent into insanity in 1808? The best-selling popular historian, Roy Porter, looks at the bizarre and savage practices used by doctors for treating those afflicted by manias, ranging from huge doses of opium, blood-letting, and cold water immersion to beatings, confinement in cages, and blistering. The author also reveals how Bethlem—the London asylum created to care for the mentally sick of the capital—was riddled with sadism and embezzlement, and if that wasn’t dehumanizing enough, ogling sightseers were permitted entry—for a fee of course.

A professor of social history shares a lifetime of insights into the metaphysics of the body by retracing the emergence of a renaissance understanding of the body and the fading notion of a soul contained within it. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

A brief but engaging history of medicine covers the field in lively fashion, from ancient Indian healing practices that combined diet and meditation to modern pharmaceuticals such as Viagra. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

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