The East End of London experienced an explosion of its Jewish population, from 35,000 in 1881 to 120,000 in 1910. The majority were poor, of foreign birth, living in overcrowded, sub-standard housing, and engaged in unhealthy occupations. Their arrival brought problems for both the indigenous population and the existing London Jewish community, threatening a crisis which could have overwhelmed the strained general medical services and irreparably damaged the Jewish community. A further problem was the attempt by various missionary societies to provide medical assistance at the cost of religious conversion. The crisis was averted, due to the efforts of the poor themselves and the wealthy established Jews - not always in harmony; and to simultaneous advances being made in public health, medicine, national insurance, and the improving Poor Law facilities. The major triumph of the immigrants, who preferred denominational institutions, was in establishing the London Jewish Hospital after a prolonged bitter battle against Lord Rothschild and many wealthy anglicised Jews, who considered the existing hospitals sufficient and wished to avoid jeopardising concessions already gained for Jews from the London Hospital and other medical centres. London, and the East End in particular, had many medical resources superior to those elsewhere in the country. The East End Jews enjoyed the added advantage of a comprehensive network of Jewish institutions and organisations, of which the Jewish Board of Guardians was foremost, which supplemented the Poor Law and voluntary systems and which had been created and funded largely by the rich of the community. In many areas of medical care Jewish organisations led the way. The initial effect was that the poor East End Jews, and especially their children, enjoyed better health than their non-Jewish neighbours in similar circumstances; but as the anglicisation of the immigrant increased, so the differences narrowed.

This dissertation uncovers women healers' vital role in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century healthcare marketplace. Euro-American women healers participated in networks of health information sharing that reached across lines of class and gender, and included female practitioners in American Indian and African American communities. Although their contributions to the healthcare labor force are relatively invisible in the historical record, women healers in the Delaware Valley provided the bulk of healthcare for their families and communities. Nonetheless, apart from a few notable monographs, women healers' practices and authority remain understudied. My project complicates a medical historiography that marginalizes female practitioners and narrates their declining healthcare authority after the mid-eighteenth century due to the emergence of a consumer society, a culture of domesticity, the professionalization of medicine, and the rise of enlightened science, which generated discourses of women's innate irrationality. Using the Philadelphia area as a case study, I argue that women healers were not merely static traditional practitioners destined to fall victim to the march of science, medicine, and capitalism as this older narrative suggests. Instead, I assert that women healers of various classes and ethnicities adapted their practices as they found new sources of healthcare authority through female education in the sciences, manuscript authorship, access to medical print media, the culture of sensibility, and the alternative gender norms of religious groups like the Quakers. Building on a longstanding foundation of recognized female practitioners, medically skilled women continued to fashion healing authority by participating in mutually affirming webs of medical information exchanges that reflected new ideas about science, health, and the body. In addition, women doctresses, herbalists, apothecaries, and druggists empowered themselves by participating in an increasingly commercialized and consumer-oriented healthcare marketplace. Within this unregulated environment, women healers in the colonies and early republic challenged physicians' claims to a monopoly on medical knowledge and practice. The practitioners analyzed in this study represent a bridge between the recognized and skilled women healers of the seventeenth century and the female healthcare professionals of the nineteenth century. / History

Pražské nemocnice v letech 1948-1968 Ing. Mgr. Kateřina Murtingerová Summary: This work presents a development of Prague hospitals during 1948 and 1968. The first part of my thesis describes theoretical and historical background of health care provision in the first half of the 20st century and it is focused on development of Czech healthcare system. This part of thesis also includes reform plans and concepts proposed during the first republic and the Second World War, with special attention to Albert and Nedvěd's plans playing a key role in setting of healthcare provision after the year 1948. The second part of this thesis is based on legislative and institutional analysis after the Second World War that was developing hand in hand with social, political, and economic changes in Czechoslovakia. Important part of this capture is also an assessment of the results of health care provision during 1948-1968 from the perspective of the whole country, including structure and availability of hospital care, demographic trends and population health trends, expenditure of health care provision and preventive measures etc. Thesis also includes historical overview of academic environment. The issue of Prague hospitals and hospital care is framed in the context of institutional and legal framework of health care system...