Month: October 2013

In a previous post we looked at early modern night-mares and the resemblance they bore to sleep paralysis. I have recently been researching the issue of ill-health during childhood and puberty to consider the consequences this would have on adult masculinity. As a part of this I have been reading

Dr Hannah Newton Bedwetting is a normal part of early childhood. Only if it becomes habitual, or occurs in children over the age of six or seven, is it regarded as a problem.1 Even then, health professionals generally steer clear of pharmaceutical treatments, favouring instead such measures as bedwetting alarms and

Next summer myself and Dr Ciara Meehan will be hosting a conference on the perceptions of pregnancy from the medieval period to the modern at the University of Hertfordshire. Here is the call for papers and a link to the conference website: Perceptions of Pregnancy:  From the Medieval to the

Dr Sara Read In the next part of our occasional series on early modern therapeutics, this week’s post looks at phlebotomy or bloodletting. As we’ve discussed before, blood was one of the four main bodily humours and early modern people saw keeping their blood levels stable as one of the