By Today’s post is the second in our series of book reviews. Old Age and Disease in Early Modern Medicine by Daniel Schäfer (Pickering and Chatto, 2011) Schäfer begins Old Age and Disease (after a brief introduction outlining his sources and methodology) with an exploration the influence of the ancient medical writers on early modern understandings
The Mistaken Midwife
Midwives have been mentioned often on this blog. They were a central feature of many women’s birthing experiences in the early modern period. Their work, character and bodily condition have, at various points, all come under the scrutiny of their contemporaries and, later, historians. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries some
Wounded at War
In my new research project I have been reading a lot of surgical treatises. Many popular accounts of early modern surgery focus on the idea that before the advent of anaesthesia and antiseptics the majority of surgical patients experienced exquisite torture, particularly in something like an amputation, and subsequently died