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Ailing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French men and women, members of their families, or their local physician or surgeon, could write to high profile physicians and surgeons seeking expert medical advice. This study, the first full-length examination of the practice of consulting by letter, provides a cohesive portrayal of some of the widespread ailments of French society in the latter part of the early modern period. It explores how and why changes occurred in the relationships between those who sought and those who provided medical advice. Previous studies of epistolary medical consulting have limited attention to the output of one or two practitioners, but this study uses the consu...
This book explores the identity of the 'French disease' (alias the 'French pox' or 'Morbus Gallicus') in the German Imperial city of Augsburg between 1495 and 1630. Rejecting the imposition of modern conceptions of disease upon the past, it reveals how early modern medical theory facilitated enormous flexibility in defining disease, and how disease identification was a local matter, and one of constant negotiation and renegotiation. Drawing on a wealth of primary source material this work combines concern with the conceptualisation of the disease with its practical application, and argues for the inseparability of both. It focuses on how theoretical understanding of the pox shaped the variou...
A brilliant, unknown work by the great historian Hugh Trevor-Roper Among the papers of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died in 2003, was a manuscript to which he had repeatedly turned for more than thirty years, but never published. Attracted by the diverse life and vivid personality of Sir Theodore de Mayerne (1573-1655), the most famous physician in Europe of his time, Trevor-Roper pursued him across national and intellectual frontiers to uncover the details of his extraordinary life. Exploring an array of English and European sources, Trevor-Roper reveals the story of the pioneering Swiss Huguenot doctor who mixed medicine with diplomacy, with political intrigue, with secret intelligence, and with...
Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires charts in vivid detail the largely forgotten history of European corpse medicine, when kings, ladies, gentlemen, priests and scientists prescribed, swallowed or wore human blood, flesh, bone, fat, brains and skin against epilepsy, bruising, wounds, sores, plague, cancer, gout and depression. One thing we are rarely taught at school is this: James I refused corpse medicine; Charles II made his own corpse medicine; and Charles I was made into corpse medicine. Ranging from the execution scaffolds of Germany and Scandinavia, through the courts and laboratories of Italy, France and Britain, to the battlefields of Holland and Ireland, and on to the tribal man-eating...
This book is the first transcription and extensive commentary on a fascinating but almost entirely overlooked manuscript compilation of medical recipes and letters, which is held in the University of Nottingham. Collected by the Marquess and Marchioness of Newcastle, William and Margaret Cavendish, during the 1640s and 1650s, this manuscript features letters of advice, recipes, and sundry philosophical and medical reflections by some of the most formidable and influential physicians, philosophers, and courtly scholars of the early seventeenth century. These include “Europe’s physician” Theodore de Mayerne, the adventurer and courtier Kenelm Digby, and the natural philosopher, poet, and playwright Margaret Cavendish. While the transcription and accompanying annotations will allow a diverse array of readers to appreciate the manuscript for the first time, the introduction situates the Cavendishes’ recipe collecting habits, medical preoccupations, natural philosophical views, and politics within their social, cultural, and philosophical contexts, and draws out some of the most significant implications of this important document.
Through close analysis of texts, cultural and civic communities, and intellectual history, the papers in this collection, for the first time, propose a dynamic relationship between rhetoric and medicine as discourses and disciplines of cure in early modern Europe. Although the range of theoretical approaches and methodologies represented here is diverse, the essays collectively explore the theories and practices, innovations and interventions, that underwrite the shared concerns of medicine, moral philosophy, and rhetoric: care and consolation, reading, policy, and rectitude, signinference, selfhood, and autonomy-all developed and refined at the intersection of areas of inquiry usually thoug...
Wounds were a potent signifier reaching across all aspects of life in Europe in the middle ages, and their representation, perception and treatment is the focus of this volume. Following a survey of the history of medical wound treatment in the middle ages, paired chapters explore key themes situating wounds within the context of religious belief, writing on medicine, status and identity, and surgical practice. The final chapter reviews the history of medieval wounding through the modern imagination. Adopting an innovative approach to the subject, this book will appeal to all those interested in how past societies regarded health, disease and healing and will improve knowledge of not only the practice of medicine in the past, but also of the ethical, religious and cultural dimensions structuring that practice.
This book investigates the role of exemplarity as a rhetorical device in late Elizabethan and Jacobean literature and culture. Ullyot argues that exemplarity is driven by both reader and author, and that positive moral examples were presented as aspirational models in posthumous biography.
A fascinating case study of the complex psychic relationship between religion and madness in early seventeenth-century England, the narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman's experience of mental disorder. The writer, Dionys Fitzherbert, recounts the course of her affliction and recovery and describes various delusions and confusions, concerned with (among other things) her family and her place within it; her relation to religion; and the status of the body, death and immortality. Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England presents in modern typography an annotated edition of the author's manuscript of this unusual and compelling text. Also inclu...
This collection of twelve essays explores various aspects in the development of medicine from the Middle Ages to 1700 with a particular emphasis on revisiting original texts for new insights in the culture of healing.