Month: June 2014

I have often mentioned that early modern men and women liked to exchange useful advice on medical treatments. We have seen that Samuel Hartlib sought out advice from his friends and that his friends were eager to help him find a remedy to prevent bladder stones. Manuscript recipe books are

‘I began to perceive I was with Child’: Pregnancy and Prostitution. Dr Sara Read Professor David Lodge famously wrote that ‘Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way round’.1 This seems to be especially true of the erotic literature produced in Restoration

(I should probably insert a NSFW warning in here – depending on where you work) Now as regular readers will be aware much of my research is focused on infertility and impotence. However, there were other troubling medical problems that affected the reproductive organs. One such problem was, we could

This week I was back in the British Library reading the correspondence of Sir Hans Sloane. Sloane (1660-1753) was a very well-respected Physician working in London and received letters from a variety of people seeking his medical advice and care. If you want to read about the letters (and you can’t get to the