1st Edition
Early Modern Medicine An Introduction to Source Analysis
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.
Introduction
Olivia Weisser
Part 1: Institutions
1. The Transatlantic Business of Medicine
Zachary Dorner
2. Medicine in the Convent
Sharon T. Strocchia
3. The Curious Case of the Two Antonios: What Hospital Records Can and Cannot Tell Us
Elizabeth W. Mellyn
4. Legal Records in Early Modern Spain
Carolin Schmitz
5. Brotherhoods, Poor Relief, and Healthcare
Laurinda Abreu
Part 2: Medical Writing
6. Medical Casebooks
Lauren Kassell
7. Experimenting with Drugs
Alisha Rankin
8. An Imperial Doctor’s Guide to Bone Setting, 1742
Yi-Li Wu
9. Physicians’ Treatises: the Ottoman Case
Miri Shefer-Mossensohn
10. Missionary Remedies
Sebestian Kroupa
11. Vernacular Medical Print: Or How to Read a Recipe Book
Elaine Leong
Part 3: The Everyday
12. Life Writing
Olivia Weisser
13. Family Letters
Sandra Cavallo
14. Newspaper Advertisements from the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean
Elise A. Mitchell
15. Disability History from Slavery’s Archive
Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy
16. Reproducing Ballads
Mary E. Fissell
Part 4: Objects & Images
17. Book Illustrations: Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book
Rebecca Whiteley
18. Medicine Containers and Healing Vessels
Anna Winterbottom
Biography
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.
