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Based on thousands of letters written by patients and their relatives and on a wide range of other sources, this book provides the first comprehensive account of how early modern people understood, experienced and dealt with common diseases and how they dealt with them on a day-to-day basis.
The period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment constitutes a vital phase in the history of European medicine. Elements of continuity with the classical and medieval past are evident in the ongoing importance of a humor-based view of medicine and the treatment of illness. At the same time, new theories of the body emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to challenge established ideas in medical circles. In recent years, scholars have explored this terrain with increasingly fascinating results, often revising our previous understanding of the ways in which early modern Europeans discussed the body, health and disease. In order to understand these and related processes, historians are increasingly aware of the way in which every aspect of medical care and provision in early modern Europe was shaped by the social, religious, political and cultural concerns of the age.
The Sick Child in Early Modern England is a powerful exploration of the treatment, perception, and experience of illness in childhood, from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. At this time, the sickness or death of a child was a common occurrence - over a quarter of young people died before the age of fifteen - and yet this subject has received little scholarly attention. Hannah Newton takes three perspectives: first, she investigates medical understandings and treatments of children. She argues that a concept of 'children's physic' existed amongst doctors and laypeople: the young were thought to be physiologically distinct, and in need of special medicines. Secondly, she examines the family's' experience, demonstrating that parents devoted considerable time and effort to the care of their sick offspring, and experienced feelings of devastating grief upon their illnesses and deaths. Thirdly, she takes the strikingly original viewpoint of sick children themselves, offering rare and intimate insights into the emotional, spiritual, physical, and social dimensions of sickness, pain, and death. Newton asserts that children's experiences were characterised by profound ambivalence: whilst young patients were often tormented by feelings of guilt, fears of hell, and physical pain, sickness could also be emotionally and spiritually uplifting, and invited much attention and love from parents. Drawing on a wide array of printed and archival sources, The Sick Child is of vital interest to scholars working in the interconnected fields of the history of medicine, childhood, parenthood, bodies, emotion, pain, death, religion, and gender.
A concise and accessible introduction to health and healing in Europe from 1500 to 1800.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The history of early modern medicine often makes for depressing reading. It implies that people fell ill, took ineffective remedies, and died. Misery to Mirth seeks to rebalance and brighten our overall picture of early modern health by focusing on the neglected subject of recovery from illness in England, c.1580-1720. Drawing on an array of archival and printed materials, Misery to Mirth shows that recovery did exist conceptually at this time, and that it was a widely reported phenomenon. The book takes three main perspectives: the first is physiological or medical, asking what doctors and laypeople meant by recovery, and how they thought it occurred. This includes a discussion of convalescent care, a special branch of medicine designed to restore strength to the fragile body after illness. Secondly, the book adopts the viewpoint of patients themselves: it investigates how they reacted to escape from death, the abatement of pain and suffering, and the return to normal life and work. The third perspective concerns the patient's loved ones; it shows that family and friends usually shared the feelings of patients, undergoing a dramatic transformation from anguish to elation. Through these discussions, the volume shines a light on some of the most profound, as well as the more prosaic, aspects of early modern existence, from attitudes to life and death, to details of what convalescents ate for supper and wore in bed.
The ideological underpinnings of early modern theories of contagion are dissected in this volume by an integrated team of literary scholars, cultural historians, historians of medicine and art historians. Even today, the spread of disease inspires moralizing discourse and the ostracism of groups thought responsible for contagion; the fear of illness and the desire to make sense of it are demonstrated in the current preoccupation with HIV, SARS, 'mad cow' disease, West Nile virus and avian flu, to cite but a few contemporary examples. Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe explores the nature of understanding when humanity is faced with threats to its well-being, if not to its very survival.
Illness in childhood was common in early modern England. Hannah Newton asks how sick children were perceived and treated by doctors and laypeople, examines the family's experience, and takes the original perspective of sick children themselves. She provides rare and intimate insights into the experiences of sickness, pain, and death.
Explores the experiences of the sick poor in modern Europe via an analysis of pauper narratives.
How did early modern people imagine their bodies? What impact did the new disease syphilis and recurrent outbreaks of plague have on these mental landscapes? Why was the glutted belly such a potent symbol of pathology? Ranging from the Reformation through the English Civil War, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England is a unique study of a fascinating cultural imaginary of 'disease' and its political consequences. Healy's original approach illuminates the period's disease-impregnated literature, including works by Shakespeare, Milton, Dekker, Heywood and others.
Conserving health in early modern culture explores the impact of ideas about healthy living in early modern England and Italy. The attention of medical historians has largely been focussed on the study of illness and medical treatment, yet prevention was one of the cornerstones of early modern medicine. According to Galenic-Hippocratic thought, the preservation of health depended on the careful management of the so-called six ?Non-Naturals?: the air one breathed; food and drink; excretions; sleep; movement and rest; and emotions. Drawing on visual, material and textual sources, the contributors show the pervasiveness of the preventive paradigm in early modern culture and society. In particular it becomes apparent that concern for the non-naturals informed lay people?s daily lives and routines as well as stimulating innovation in material culture and painting, and influencing discourses in fields as diverse as geology, natural philosophy and religion. At the same time the volume challenges the common assumption that health advice was a uniform and stable body of knowledge, showing instead that models of healthy living were tailored to different genders, age-groups and categories of patients; they also varied over time and depended on the geographical context. In particular, significant differences emerge between what was regarded as beneficial or harmful to health in England and Italy. As well as showing the value of a comparative perspective of study, this interdisciplinary volume will appeal to a wide readership, interested not just in health practices, but in print culture, histories of women, infancy, the environment and of art and material culture.