Secrets And Knowledge In Medicine And Science 1500 1800

Secrets played a central role in transformations in medical and scientific knowledge in early modern Europe. As a new fascination with novelty began to take hold from the late fifteenth century, Europeans thirsted for previously unknown details about the natural world: new plants, animals, and other objects from nature, new recipes for medical and alchemical procedures, new knowledge about the human body, and new facts about the way nature worked. These 'secrets' became popular items of commerce and trade, as the quest for new and exclusive bits of information met the vibrant early modern marketplace. Whether disclosed widely in print or kept more circumspect in manuscripts, secrets helped drive an expanding interest in acquiring knowledge throughout early modern Europe. Bringing together international scholars, this volume provides a pan-European and interdisciplinary overview on the topic. Each essay offers significant new interpretations of the role played by secrets in their area of specialization. Chapters address key themes in early modern history and the history of medicine, science and technology including: the possession, circulation and exchange of secret knowledge across Europe; alchemical secrets and laboratory processes; patronage and the upper-class market for secrets; medical secrets and the emerging market for proprietary medicines; secrets and cosmetics; secrets and the body and finally gender and secrets.

This book addresses magical ideas and practices in early modern Norway. It examines a large corpus of Norwegian manuscripts from 1650-1850 commonly called Black Books which contained a mixture of recipes on medicine, magic, and art. Ane Ohrvik assesses the Black Books from the vantage point of those who wrote the manuscripts and thus offers an original study of how early modern magical practitioners presented their ideas and saw their practices. The book show how the writers viewed magic and medicine both as practical and sacred art and as knowledge worth protecting through encoding the text. The study of the Black Books illuminates how ordinary people in Norway conceptualized magic as valuable and useful knowledge worth of collecting and saving despite the ongoing witchcraft prosecutions targeting the very same ideas and practices as the books promoted. Medicine, Magic and Art in Early Modern Norway is essential for those looking to advance their studies in magical beliefs and practices in early modern Europe as well as those interested in witchcraft studies, book history, and the history of knowledge.

Across early modern Europe, men and women from all ranks gathered medical, culinary, and food preservation recipes from family and friends, experts and practitioners, and a wide array of printed materials. Recipes were tested, assessed, and modified by teams of householders, including masters and servants, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, and fathers and sons. This much-sought know-how was written into notebooks of various shapes and sizes forming “treasuries for health,” each personalized to suit the whims and needs of individual communities. In Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Elaine Leong situates recipe knowledge and practices among larger questions of gender and cultural history, the history of the printed word, and the history of science, medicine, and technology. The production of recipes and recipe books, she argues, were at the heart of quotidian investigations of the natural world or “household science”. She shows how English homes acted as vibrant spaces for knowledge making and transmission, and explores how recipe trials allowed householders to gain deeper understandings of sickness and health, of the human body, and of natural and human-built processes. By recovering this story, Leong extends the parameters of natural inquiry and productively widens the cast of historical characters participating in and contributing to early modern science.

Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.

What sort of information did people in early modern England seek? In The Practical Renaissance Donna Seger explores the diffusion and reception of prescriptive publications over the 16th and 17th centuries. Published in an age of dynamic religious and political change, these texts demonstrate the universal desire for health and wealth, a fortified body and an orderly household. Showing how classical and continental information had been "Englished" over time, this book shows how new publications supplanted these traditional ideas with more empirical and authoritative knowledge. Published in an age of dynamic religious and political change, these texts, which include plague tracts, husbandry handbooks, printed recipe books, and navigation manuals, demonstrate the universal desire for health and wealth, a fortified body and an orderly household. Divided into three parts, the opening chapters explore factors which affected the diffusion of practical knowledge via prescriptive texts. Part two focuses on the interaction between new discoveries and traditional authority, and the final section considers debates in the 'medical marketplace', the term 'knowledge-mongerer' and the commodification of knowledge at this time. A thorough exploration into the popular and pragmatic expressions of the period, The Practical Renaissance offers a new window into the movement in which knowledge and information became power.

This book is about the complex ways in which science and literature are mutually-informing and mutually-sustaining. It does not cast the literary and the scientific as distinct, but rather as productively in-distinct cultural practices: for the two dozen new essays collected here, the presiding concern is no longer to ask how literary writers react to scientific writers, but rather to study how literary and scientific practices are imbricated. These specially-commissioned essays from top scholars in the area range across vast territories and produce seemingly unlikely unions: between physics and rhetoric, math and Milton, Boyle and the Bible, plague and plays, among many others. In these essays so-called scientific writing turns out to traffic in metaphor, wit, imagination, and playfulness normally associated with literature provides material forms and rhetorical strategies for thinking physics, mathematics, archeology, and medicine.

Mad people's historical anthologies and republished writings -- Mad people's perspectives in institutional histories -- Mad people's historical biographies -- Mad people's activist histories -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Chapter 16: Dementia: confusion at the borderlands of aging and madness -- Dementia in the distant past -- Framing dementia as a brain disease in modern German psychiatry -- Framing dementia as a problem in the adjustment to aging in mid-century American psychodynamic psychiatry -- Framing dementia as dread disease and major public health crisis in an aging world -- Conclusion: the ongoing entanglement of dementia and aging -- Notes -- PART VI: Maladies, disorders, and treatments -- Chapter 17: Passions and moods -- Emotions in history -- Grand narratives and overarching themes -- Specific stories and critical contexts -- Conclusion and areas for further scholarship -- Notes -- Chapter 18: Psychosis -- Madness -- Psychosis is a special thing -- If "psychotic" means "psychosis-like," then what, pray tell, is psychosis like? -- Schizophrenia -- Notes -- Chapter 19: Somatic treatments -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Chapter 20: Psychotherapy in society: historical reflections -- Notes -- Chapter 21: The antidepressant era revisited: towards differentiation and patient-empowerment in diagnosis and treatment -- Psychopharmacology and historiography -- Towards a new chemistry of the mind -- Mother's little helpers -- Appetite for new chemical wonders for the mind -- Towards differentiation and patient empowerment in the era of genomics -- Notes -- Index