Essays on the practical aspects of medieval European medicine.

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.

This is a major synthesis of the knowledge and practice of early modern English medicine in its 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 surgeons worked upon the body and their understanding of what they were doing. The structures of practice and knowledge examined in the first part of the book came to be challenged in the later seventeenth century, when the 'new science' began to overturn the foundation of established knowledge. However, as the second part of the book shows, traditional medical practice was so well entrenched in English culture that much of it continued into the eighteenth century. Various changes did however occur, which set the agenda for later medical treatment and which are discussed in the final chapter.

Plague has gone down in history as one of the terrors of humanity, and if there was perhaps but one word that conjured fear in the minds of people centuries ago it would have been that of 'plague'. Without any understanding of germ theory physicians could only attempt to deal with the visible symptoms of a plague attack and not overcome the bacterium at its' heart, Yersinia pestis. Plants and the Plague looks at around three dozen plant species used in the herbal medicine response to plague and pestilence in past centuries. It also looks at the clinical background to the disease, past medical thinking on the subject, courses of treatment formerly used, and numerous plague remedies that the selected plants found their way into. It is a story of superstition, tragedies of error, and faith in misguided medical precepts, but also one of incredible bravery on the part of those physicians and doctors who stayed behind to treat the afflicted and dying in the face of this killer disease.

The Black Death in Europe, from its arrival in 1347-52 into the early modern period, has been seriously misunderstood. From a wide range of sources, this study argues that it was not the rat-based bubonic plague usually blamed, and considers its effect on European culture.

This study charts the adoption of medical strategies by the seriously ill and dying, decade by decade, from the Elizabethan age of astrological medicine to the emergence of the general practitioner in the early 18th century.