Everyday Medicine

In this talk Prof Keir Waddington explores everyday Victorian medicine. 

This video celebrates the launch of our free digital resource, The People's Dispensary. 

Drama and discovery always generate interest and attention. And medicine appeared to offer a lot of drama in the nineteenth century from new procedures in the operating theatre and the introduction of new therapies and treatments to the interest and alarm expressed about what went on in the medical laboratory. Medical news of ‘advances’ fascinated contemporaries given their appetite for spectacle and their interest in progress and modernity. However, for many patients and their families in the nineteenth century their experiences of medicine did not always match this picture of innovation. Their experiences were more mundane. What did everyday medicine look like?