Unlike many edited volumes, the editors and contributors have made a concerted effort here to integrate their contributions speak to each other. Particularly valuable are the efforts that each chapter makes to show how historical research can improve contemporary policy making. The volume convincingly shows that patients—including those outside the entitled classes—were far from voiceless; by reading records ‘against the grain’ or mining extant archival collections with them in mind, these historians have lived up to Roy Porter’s call to write more patient-centred narratives.
Social History of Medicine

Introduction: searching for the patient – Anne Hanley and Jessica Meyer
Part I: Locating the patient: new approaches
1 The non-patient’s view – Michael Worboys
2 Family not to be informed? The ethical use of historical medical documentation – Jessica Meyer and Alexia Moncrieff
Part II: Voices from the institution
3 Lunatics’ rights activism in Britain and the German Empire, 1870–1920: a European perspective – Burkhart Brückner
4 Narrating and navigating patient experiences of farm work in English psychiatric institutions, 1845–1914 – Sarah Holland
5 The patient’s view as history from below: evidence from the Victorian poor, 1834–71 – Paul Carter and Steve King
Part III: User-driven medicine
6 Respiratory technologies and the co-production of breathing in the twentieth century – Coreen McGuire, Jaipreet Virdi and Jenny Hutton
7 The patient’s new clothes: British soldiers as complementary practitioners in the First World War – Georgia McWhinney
Part IV: Negotiating stigma and shame
8 ‘Dear Dr Kirkpatrick’: recovering Irish experiences of VD, 1924–47 – Lloyd (Meadhbh) Houston
9 ‘I caught it and yours truly was very sorry for himself’: mapping the emotional worlds of British VD patients – Anne Hanley
Index