The research described in this thesis addresses two central issues. The first issue concerns the development of a series of practice standards that will promote the quality of the lives of older people who live in nursing homes. However, before this professional issue is addressed, it is necessary to explore the meaning of the underlying concept the quality of life, and this constitutes the second issue.The purpose of this research is therefore to develop a concept of the quality of life that can adequately support a series of practice standards. The thesis is presented in five parts. Part one outlines the theoretical context of the study. It contains two chapters. The first discusses philosophical hermeneutics, which forms the conceptual and methodological framework of the research; and the second reviews aspects of the literature of the quality of life and evaluates it in terms of the purposes of the research. Part two of the thesis describes the empirical phase of the research, including the approach to data collection and the analytical strategy that was used. In part three the findings are presented, and in part four their implications are discussed for the organisation of care, and practice standards are derived. Part five evaluates the research, paying particular attention to the usefulness of philosophical hermeneutics, and suggestions are made for further research.

The Seminole people of Florida have used plants as traditional remedies for hundreds of years. After European contact their knowledge was transformed from proto-Muskhogean practices to new hybrids of traditional and modem practices. As a result of European pressure and influence, there is a risk of this knowledge being lost. Traditional Botanical Knowledge (TBK) can shed light on new compounds and healing properties for use in the medical and holistic communities of the U.S. This project systematically examines the connections between extant cosmological knowledge and extant medicinal knowledge among the Seminole. This study uses a number of methods and sources of data: ethnographic interviews, field observations at Seminole and Miccosukee events, demographic information, myths, material culture, artwork, field notes and publications by anthropologists and botanists were used as well to find patterns connecting medicinal flora with metaphysical associations such as animals, directions, colors, and temperatures similar to other Native American cultures. Larger implications of this research include the production of a useful ethno-medical and ethno-botanical research tool and the preservation of cultural practices within a threatened culture.

Until recent years research into medieval hospitals of England, Scotland and Wales has been a topic that has been somewhat neglected by historians and archaeologists. The majority of work carried out to date has focused on individual institutions, small geographical areas, or specific types of hospital. Whilst many of those studies have been well researched and highly informative, few have provided an insight into regional differences or similarities throughout these three countries. This thesis compares and contrasts a variety of aspects of medieval hospitals, such as the layout of the buildings, the saint(s) to whom they were dedicated, the type of people cared for in them, and the people who founded and ran them, in an attempt to identify any regional patterns that may have existed in medieval times. As the length of period studied spans almost five hundred years, it is possible to examine the changes in development of medieval hospitals. Rising and waning popularity for those saints who were venerated in connection with care for the poor and the sick is tracked throughout the centuries covered in these pages. Likewise, the choices of design for hospital buildings from the 11 th century to the 16th century are explored, along with the changes in the status of founders, and the number, type and gender of staff and inmates during that time frame. Periods of growth and decline in hospitals were apparent, the most notable being the falling number of hospital foundations across most of Britain in the late 13 th century and the early 14th century. This is examined on a regional scale, as well as nationally, with a view to gaining a better understanding of the causes that may have resulted in such a decline.

The thesis explores the intersection between medicine and religion in the context of colonisation in Korea in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. I will focus on the work of medical missionaries from Europe and North America that pursued perfect cleanliness in body, mind and society, including total abstinence and spiritual cleanliness, by spreading biomedical concept of hygiene. One of the points that I will articulate is the ways in which medicine as a colonising force in its own right worked in the mission field to produce 'the docile bodies of people' in the Foucauldian sense. I will argue that what mission medicine in Korea utilised and relied on for its work was a new concept of cleanliness based on biomedical knowledge, the germ theory, rather than the power of colonisation. It was because mission medicine in Korea often worked without collaborating with direct colonial powers. In this sense, Protestant Christianity and biomedicine shared a common foundation in 'cleanliness.' Consequently, I will try to emphasise the multi-dimensional and multi-directional role of the use of cleanliness as an efficacious tool for control of the body. In relation to the historiography of medicine in Korea, I will argue that Confucianism served the social and cultural control of bodies as a medicalised form and that Christianity tried to replace it by providing new knowledge concerning body, disease, health, and cleanliness. In the same respect, I will explore the historical relationship between the germ theory and missionary medicine in Korea. The germ theories of disease were not simply a new etiology but also an effective cultural implement to change people's lives. Thus, the theories did not simply remain in the realm of medicine but were introduced, disseminated, and applied to all matters relating to the body, including its mental and spiritual aspects, through the concept of cleanliness.

Divine healing has been often seen in opposition to human healing. The two spheres, have been considered as separate, both in space and in terms of elements involved. Asclepian sanctuaries have been mostly presented as domains of exclusively divine intervention, without any involvement of the human factor, possibly with the sole exception of dream interpretation. However, the written testimonies of temple cures, both those in the form of cure inscriptions dedicated in sanctuaries and the literary accounts of the incubation experience, give us reasons to suppose that the practical side of the functioning of the asklepieia could have assumed the involvement of human medicine, with the extent of this involvement differing in various epochs. Regardless of physicians' participation or its lack in the procedure, the methods applied in sanctuary healing appear to have evolved in parallel to the developments in medicine and their popular perception. Archaeological finds as well as the image of Asclepius as the god of medicine itself seem to confirm this. Nevertheless, by no means should these connections between the two spheres be treated as transforming the space of religious meaning into hospitals functioning under the auspices of a powerful god. Although acknowledging them does entail inclusion of human medicine within the space dedicated to Asclepius, it does not thereby deny the procedure of incubation its religious and metaphysical dimension. On the contrary, it shows that to the Greek mind divine and human healing were not mutually exclusive, but overlapped and coincided with each other, proving that the Greek sense of rationality was quite different from the modern and could comprise far more than what we call today "scientific thinking".

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