ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book highlights the contexts and contents of medical journalism up to the mid-Victorian age. It examines the standing of doctors and the writing of medical ‘scandal’ within the popular press of mid-Victorian England, indirectly revealing precisely why the professional medical press proper was at such pains to establish its own credentials and respectability. The book looks at the rise of a specialized psychiatric press. It discusses the reporting of public health issues would certainly suggest that, as the medical profession itself grew more specialized, a division of labour, and even of sympathies, emerged alongside within medical press publishing. In the development of the scholarly division of labour, medical historians have developed their own ‘separate sphere’, distinct from historians of the press, publishing and periodicals.