Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).

1. Introduction: Hospital medicine in eighteenth-century London. The setting. Transformations. Hospital medicine -- 2. The London hospitals: Virtue and value. Charity and the hospitals. Hospital practitioners -- 3. The Corporations, licensing, and reform, 1700-1815. The London corporations: Membership and licensing. Education at the halls and college. Education, war, and the colleges: Reform and responses, 1780-1815 -- 4. Walking the wards: From apprentices to pupils. Apprentices and pupils, character and cash. On the wards: Increasing numbers, blurry boundaries. Learning on the wards -- 5. London lecturing: Public knowledge and private courses. Private and public: Business, knowledge, access, and authority. The London system: An overview. Entrepreneurs: Entertainment and expertise, 1700-1760. Bodies and businesses: Hospital lecturing, 1760-1820 -- 6. Gentlemen scholars and clinical cases, 1700-1760. Public persona: Publishing. Publicity and polemics. Ancients and moderns.

Charitable Knowledge explores the interconnections between medical teaching, medical knowledge, and medical authority in eighteenth-century London. The metropolis lacked a university until the nineteenth century, so the seven major voluntary hospitals - St Bartholomew's, St Thomas's, Guy's, the Westminster, St George's, the Middlesex, and the London - were crucial sites for educating surgeons, surgeon-apothecaries, and visiting physicians. Lawrence explains how charity patients became teaching objects, and how hospitals became medical schools. She demonstrates that hospital practitioners gradually gained authority within an emerging medical community, transforming the old tripartite structure into a loosely unified group of de facto general practitioners dominated by hospital men. As hospital physicians and surgeons became the new elite, they profoundly shaped what counted as 'good' knowledge among medical men, both in the construction of clinical observations and in the proper use of science.