1. Introduction Andrew Wear; 2. Healers in the medical market place: towards a social history of Graeco-Roman medicine Vivian Nutton; 3. Medicine and society in medieval Europe, 500-1500 Katharine Park; 4. The patient in England, c. 1660-c. 1800 Roy Porter; 5. Making sense of health and the environment in early modern England Andrew Wear; 6. Medicine in the age of Enlightenment Guenter B. Granshaw; 7. The rise of the modern hospital in Britain Lindsay Granshaw; 8. Medical practitioners 1750-1850 and the period of medical reform in Britain Irvine Loudon; 9. Public health, preventive medicine and professionalization: England and America in the nineteenth century Elizabeth Fee and Dorothy Porter; 10. Madness and its institutions Roy Porter; 11. From infectious to chronic diseases: changing patterns of sickness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Paul Weindling; 12. Providers, 'consumers', the state and the delivery of health care services in twentieth-century Britain Jane Lewis; 13. The implications of increased life expectancy for family and social life Arthur E. Imhof; Index.