Medical Misadventure in an Age of Professionalisation, 1780–1890

Medical Misadventure considers the doctors whose careers were disrupted or entirely derailed by misfortune, ineptitude, or temptation to crime. Conflicts with colleagues, and threats to medical masculinity, gave rise to extraordinary stories of loss, distress, and occasional recovery. -- .

---

This book looks at medical professionalisation from a new perspective, one of failure rather than success. It questions the existing picture of broad and rising medical prosperity across the nineteenth century to consider the men who did not keep up with professionalising trends. It unpicks the life stories of men who could not make ends meet or who could not sustain a professional persona of disinterested expertise, either because they could not overcome public accusations of misconduct or because they struggled privately with stress. In doing so it uncovers the trials of the medical marketplace and the pressures of medical masculinity. All professionalising groups risked falling short of rising expectations, but for doctors these expectations were inflected in some occupationally specific ways. -- .