Hands-on History: Making and Knowing in Early Modern Europe

An annotated translation of Jean Fernel s On the Hidden Causes of Things (1542), with a scholarly introduction showing its great importance in the intellectual history of the Renaissance. The only sixteenth-century writer, apart from Paracelsus, to develop a new theory of disease, Fernel was also a leading natural philosopher. His survey of the role of occult qualities and powers in life processes, especially generation, and in contagious and pestilential diseases draws upon astrology, alchemy, and other occult sciences. Although an original and innovatory thinker, Fernel operated within the parameters of Aristotelian and Galenic philosophy, while drawing upon Platonic, Stoic and other worldviews. Accordingly, this book shows the continued vitality in traditional thought in the period just before the Scientific Revolution.

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.

What did you do when you fell ill in fifteenth-century Florence? How did you get the medicines that you needed at a price you could afford? What would you find when you entered an apothecary's shop? This richly detailed study of the Speziale al Giglio in Florence provides surprising answers, demonstrating the continued importance of highly personalised medical practice late into the fifteenth century. Drawing on extensive archival research, it shows how personal relationships and mutual trust, rather than market forces, made payment possible even for those with limited incomes.

An age of quackery and medical diversity, premodern medicine has often been described as a 'medical marketplace'. But what is a 'medical marketplace'? And what does it tell us about medical practice and knowledge? This volume provides the first systematic examination of medicine and the market in England, North America and India between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Covering key themes, including magic, midwifery, and professionalization, it offers a new understanding of how healthcare operated and changed over this period.

Drawing on medical anthropology, sociology and ethics as well as cultural and social history, this book focuses on the experience of illness and on patients and folk healers as much as on the rise of medical science, doctors and hospitals.

Panaceia's Daughters provides the first book-length study of noblewomen's healing activities in early modern Europe. Drawing on rich archival sources, Alisha Rankin demonstrates that numerous German noblewomen were deeply involved in making medicines and recommending them to patients, and many gained widespread fame for their remedies. Rankin maintains that noblewomen's pharmacy came to prominence not in spite of their gender but because of it. Rankin demonstrates the ways in which noblewomen's pharmacy was bound up in notions of charity, class, religion, and household roles, as well as in expanding networks of knowledge and early forms of scientific experimentation. Case studies of renowned healers Dorothea of Mansfeld and Anna of Saxony demonstrate the value their pharmacy held in their respective roles as elderly widow and royal consort, while a study of the long-suffering Duchess Elisabeth of Rochlitz emphasizes the importance of experiential knowledge and medicinal remedies to the patient's experience of illness.

The Elder Pliny's Natural History is one of the largest and most extraordinary works to survive from antiquity. It has often been referred to as an encyclopedia, usually without full awareness of what such a characterization implies. In this book, Dr Doody examines this concept and its applicability to the work, paying far more attention than ever before to the varying ways in which it has been read during the last two thousand years, especially by Francis Bacon and Denis Diderot.

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.

This anthology explores often overlooked periods in medicine from medieval to early modern times, taking as a principal theme the need to return to familiar texts and sources for new interpretations. In twelve essays written by a diverse group of scholars, the collection covers topics such as medical politics, herbal remedies and nationalism, the role of experience in casebook writing, the use of medical allusions in literature and popular culture, and the changing impact of various book editions on surgery, embryology, and lay medical knowledge.