Böcker av Peter Ford

The history of Hay on Wye usually concentrates on the castle and Jacobean Mansion built on the bluff in the centre of town, and the cluster of buildings around them. Easily overlooked is the original pre-Norman settlement to the west of the town.Known as Weston Hamlets it lay outside the 1237 town walls on the flat agricultural lands of Gypsy Castle. The first Mott and Bailey castle and St Mary's Church formed the core of this settlement and legally it remained distinct from the town being part of Haia Wallensis or Welsh Hay until at least the 17th century. Latterly this is the area of the town expansion. Here are the almshouses, the workhouse, the National School, hospitals, wells, and memorials to the dearly departed. It was also the site of the Bletchley Park monitoring station for decoding Enigma signals during the Second World War. This is the story of Weston Hammett the founding settlement of what became the town of Hay on Wye, and the people who who lived there.

This is the story of the state of the health of inhabitants of Hay on Wye, a small rural town in the Welsh Marche. Life was hard but did it really need the 50 or so doctors who worked there over the last 200 years. Was it a hotbed of disease, a famous centre for healing, or just full of hypochondriacs? Charles Dickens would have us believe that life expectancy was short in Victorian times, with the spectre of disease, ill-health, infirmity and death ever present. Is this right? Read about the medieval folklore and traditional healing, the diseases inhabitants were exposed to, the healthcare they received, and the evolution of medical practice from the apothecaries to pharmacists and the early surgeons and doctors. What was the range of the doctors work, and how did the towns counsellors try to look after the health of its inhabitants? Here are its workhouse, isolation hospital, almshouses, surgeries, nurses, dentists and chemists. The doctors are listed, together with stories around their medical practice and incidents in which their services were required, a cross section of life in a typical market town.

A rounded conceptual vision of criticality in higher education for the twenty-first century, demontrating ways forward in theory, research and practice of critical thinking.