Medical elites, the general practitioner and patient power during the first cholera epidemic in Britain

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the period 1831-2 when Asiatic cholera spread through Britain, killing more than 30,000 people. However, the focus is not on the disease itself, but on how cholera's presence highlighted the structural tensions within professional medicine, the tyranny of public approval of medicine from which the medical community struggled to release itself, and the means whereby medical men sought social status..