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This collection offers readers a guide to analyzing historical texts and objects using a diverse selection of sources in early modern medicine. It provides an array of interpretive strategies while also highlighting new trends in the field.
Each chapter serves as a study of a different type of source, including the benefits and limitations of that source and what it can reveal about the history of medicine. Contributors provide practical strategies for locating and interpreting sources, putting texts and objects into conversation, and explaining potential contradictions. A wide variety of sources, including account books, legal records, and personal letters, provide new opportunities for understanding early modern medicine and developing skills in historical analysis. Together, the chapters highlight emerging methodologies and debates, while covering a range of themes in the field, from reproductive health to hospital care to household medicine.
With wide geographical breadth, this book is a valuable resource for students and researchers looking to understand how to better engage with primary sources, as well as readers interested in early modern history and the history of medicine.
List of contents
Introduction Part 1: Instituions 1. The Transatlantic Business of Medicine 2. Medicine in the Convent 3. The Curious Case of the Two Antonios: What Hospital Records Can and Cannot Tell Us 4. Legal Records in Early Modern Spain 5. Brotherhoods, Poor Relief, and Healthcare Part 2: Medical Writing 6. Medical Casebooks 7. Experimenting with Drugs 8. An Imperial Doctor's Guide to Bone Setting, 1742 9. Physicians' Treatises: the Ottoman Case 10. Missionary Remedies 11. Vernacular Medical Print: Or How to Read a Recipe Book Part 3: The Everyday 12. Life Writing 13. Family Letters 14. Newspaper Advertisements from the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean 15. Disability History from Slavery's Archive 16. Reproducing Ballads Part 4: Objects & Images 17. Book Illustrations: Jane Sharp's The Midwives Book 18. Medicine Containers and Healing Vessels
About the author
Olivia Weisser is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston where she teaches and writes about the history of health and healing in the 1500s–1700s. Her first book, Ill Composed (2015), examined how gender shaped patients’ perceptions of sickness. She is finishing a new book on the history of venereal disease.
Summary
This collection offers readers a guide to analyzing historical texts and objects using a diverse selection of sources in early modern medicine.
