First published in 1987. Even as the professionalism of medicine progressed, many sufferers continued to rely on what would now be termed "fringe" practitioners - quacks, backstreet surgeons, bone-setters, Thomsonian botanists, holists and naturalists. The essays collected in this volume all present new research on this fascinating and diverse period in the history of medicine.

Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Treating the Wages of Sin: Venereal Disease and Specialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain W. F. Bynum 2. Publicity and the Public Good: Presenting Medicine in Eighteenth-Century Bristol Jonathan Barry 3. Orthodoxy and Fringe: Medicine in Late Georgian Bristol Michael Neve 4. 'I Think Ye both Quacks': The Controversy between Dr Theodor Myersbach and Dr John Coakley Lettsom Roy Porter 5. Property Rights and the Right to Health: The Regulation of Secret Remedies in France, 1789-1815 Matthew Ramsey 6. 'The Vile Race of Quacks with which this Country Infested' Irvine Loudon 7. The Orthodox Fringe: The Origins of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain S. W. F. Holloway 8. Bones of Contention? Orthodox Medicine and the Mystery of the Bone-setter's Craft Roger Cooter 9 . Physical Puritanism and Sanitary Science: Material and Immaterial Beliefs in Popular Physiology, 1650-1840 Virginia Smith 10. Early Victorian Radicals and the Medical Fringe J. F. C. Harrison 11. Social Context and Medical Theory in the Demarcation of Nineteenth-century Boundaries P. S. Brown 12. Medical Sectarianism, Therapeutic Conflict, and the Shaping of Orthodox Professional Identity in Antebellum American Medicine John Harley Warner; Index