Knowledge And Practice In English Medicine 1550 1680

This is a major synthesis of the knowledge and practice of early modern English medicine in its social and cultural contexts. The book vividly maps out some central areas: remedies (and how they were made credible), notions of disease, advice on preventive medicine and on healthy living, and how surgeons worked upon the body and their understanding of what they were doing. The structures of practice and knowledge examined in the first part of the book came to be challenged in the later seventeenth century, when the 'new science' began to overturn the foundation of established knowledge. However, as the second part of the book shows, traditional medical practice was so well entrenched in English culture that much of it continued into the eighteenth century. Various changes did however occur, which set the agenda for later medical treatment and which are discussed in the final chapter.

Annotation This is a major synthesis of the knowledge and practice of early modern English medicine, as expressed in vernacular texts set in their social and cultural contexts. The book vividly maps out some central areas: remedies (and how they were made credible), notions of disease, advice on preventive medicine and on healthy living, and how and why surgeons worked on the body. In particular, two of the most high-profile diseases of the age--the pox and the plague--are discussed in detail, and their treatment analyzed.

The first study to analyze print vernacular folio herbals from the standpoint of gender and to present original findings to do with early modern women's ownership of these herbals, Medical Authority and Englishwomen's Herbal Texts also looks at reasons and contexts behind early modern female writers claiming herbal practice. Author Rebecca Laroche first establishes cultural backdrops in the gendering of medical authority that takes place in the herbals and the regular ownership of these herbals by women. She then examines women's engagements with herbal texts in life writings and poetry and asks how these moments represent and engage medical authority. In ultimately demonstrating how female writers variously take on women's herbal medical practices, Laroche reveals the broad range of literary potentials within the historical category of women's medicine.

The early modern period is a particularly fascinating chapter in the history of pain. This volume investigates early modern constructions of physical pain from a variety of disciplines, including religious, legal and medical history, literary criticism, philosophy, and art history.

Medical writing tells us a great deal about how the language of science has developed in constructing and communicating knowledge in English. This volume provides a new perspective on the evolution of the special language of medicine, based on the electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, containing over two million words of medical writing from 1500 to 1700. The book presents results from large-scale empirical research on the new materials and provides a more detailed and diversified picture of domain-specific developments than any previous book. Three introductory chapters provide the sociohistorical, disciplinary and textual frame for nine empirical studies, which address a range of key issues in a wide variety of medical genres from fresh angles. The book is useful for researchers and students within several fields, including the development of special languages, genre and register analysis, (historical) corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and medical and cultural history.

The practice of medicine in the days before the development of anaesthetics could often be a brutal and painful experience. Many procedures, especially those involving surgery, must have proved almost as distressing to the doctor as to the patient. Yet in order to cure, the medical practitioner was often required to inflict pain and the patient to endure it. Some level of detachment has always been required of the doctor and especially, of the surgeon. It is the construction of this detachment, or dispassion, in early modern England, with which this work is concerned. The book explores the idea of medical dispassion and shows how practitioners developed the intellectual, verbal and manual skill of being able to replace passion with equanimity and distance. As the skill of 'dispassion' became more widespread it was both enthusiastically promoted and vehemently attacked by scientific and literary writers throughout the early modern period. To explain why the practice was so controversial and aroused such furor, this study takes into account not only patterns of medical education and clinical practice but wider debates concerning social, philosophical and religious ideas.

What was the medical marketplace? This book provides the first critical examination of medicine and the market in pre-modern England, colonial North America and British India. Chapters explore the most important themes in the social history of medicine and offer a fresh understanding of healthcare in this time of social and economic transformation.

Recipe books are a key part of food history; they register the ideals and practices of domestic work, physical health and sustenance and they are at the heart of material culture as it was experienced by early modern Englishwomen. In a world in which daily sustenance and physical health were primarily women's responsibilities, women were central to these texts that record what was both a traditional art and new science. The texts reprinted in these two volumes allow readers to reconstruct the history of recipes, both medical and culinary, from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century, and situate that history within the larger scientific and intellectual practices of the period.