Download or read book Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol written by Mary Elizabeth Fissell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-07-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early modern England, housewives, clergymen, bloodletters, herb women, and patients told authoritative tales about the body. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, medicine had begun to drown out these voices. This book argues that changes in the relationship between rich and poor underlay this rise in medicine's authority.