Military Health Care and the Early Modern State, 1660–1830

This volume demonstrates novel ways to study military health care in Europe from the 1660s to the 1830s. It improves our understanding of early modern military welfare and the emergence of public health. Caring for the intact male soldiers bodies became a key task for the early modern state, while the wounded were recognized as incomplete. Military medicine became increasingly a purpose-built instrument to select physically fit people for military service, to monitor their state of health, provide them with medical assistance in the event of wounding and make them fit for service again. The book uses a sociocultural mode to scrutinize the impact of values, habits and behaviour on the quality and effectiveness of military health care. It seeks to understand the personal contributions of military medical professionals whose work saved lives or ensured the recovery of wounded. Fresh light is shed on the improvement of human and veterinary military medical training, and on how competing interests among the scientific community inhibited medical progress and success. The volume points toward a better understanding of the organizations ethic and moral pluralism in public service. The collection also looks beyond the battlefield and considers the consequences of war for military and civil societies, while presenting female and male perspectives. The book seeks to explore individual performance and achievements of actors active in civil service, and examines the duality of informal and formal systems of health care related to their impact on military health and recovery. The studies presented in this collection are qualitative or comparative case studies. An important feature of this book is its interdisciplinary nature that make it of interest for the history of veterinary medicine, the history of science, gender studies, the history of administration and the history of epidemiology. The collection draws attention to different epistemological interests and applies a sociocultural approach to demonstrate how medicine and war were intertwined with numerous different facets of human society and culture.