26 September 2007

Doctors in the 1920s

During the office move, a box of old BMJs from the 1920s turned up. In those days the British Medical Journal (founded 1847) carried some wonderful and dreadful advertisements. Few miracle drugs but some patent medicines, lots of private (pre-NHS) nursing homes and mental asylums, scary medical machinery
and scarier undergarments -as well as cars, livery for the chauffeur, a "motor house" to keep the car inand, indeed, cigarettes.

But there were also doctors with many poor patients, as in Elizabeth Cambridge's autobiographical "Hostages to Fortune" -- she was a doctor's daughter and married a country doctor's son who was himself a doctor, living near Oxford.

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