How did 17th-century families in England perceive their health care needs? What household resources were available for medical self-help? To what extent did households make up remedies based on medicinal recipes? Drawing on previously unpublished household papers ranging from recipes to accounts and letters, this original account shows how health and illness were managed on a day-to-day basis in a variety of 17th-century households. It reveals the extent of self-help used by families, explores their favourite remedies and analyses differences in approaches to medical matters. Anne Stobart illuminates cultures of health care amongst women and men, showing how 'kitchin physick' related to the business of medicine, which became increasingly commercial and professional in the 18th century.

Across early modern Europe, men and women from all ranks gathered medical, culinary, and food preservation recipes from family and friends, experts and practitioners, and a wide array of printed materials. Recipes were tested, assessed, and modified by teams of householders, including masters and servants, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, and fathers and sons. This much-sought know-how was written into notebooks of various shapes and sizes forming “treasuries for health,” each personalized to suit the whims and needs of individual communities. In Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Elaine Leong situates recipe knowledge and practices among larger questions of gender and cultural history, the history of the printed word, and the history of science, medicine, and technology. The production of recipes and recipe books, she argues, were at the heart of quotidian investigations of the natural world or “household science”. She shows how English homes acted as vibrant spaces for knowledge making and transmission, and explores how recipe trials allowed householders to gain deeper understandings of sickness and health, of the human body, and of natural and human-built processes. By recovering this story, Leong extends the parameters of natural inquiry and productively widens the cast of historical characters participating in and contributing to early modern science.

In the seventeenth century, even the most elaborate and fashionable gardens had areas set aside for growing herbs, fruit, vegetables and flowers for domestic use, while those of more modest establishments were vital to the survival of the household. This was also a period of exciting introductions of plants from overseas.Using manuscript household manuals, recipe books and printed herbals, this book takes the reader on a tour of the productive garden and of the various parts of the house - kitchens and service rooms, living rooms and bedrooms - to show how these plants were used for cooking and brewing, medicines and cosmetics, in the making and care of clothes, and finally to keep rooms fresh, fragrant and decorated. Recipes used by seventeenth-century households for preparations such as flower syrups, snail water and wormwood ale are also included.A brief herbal gives descriptions of plants that are familiar today, others not so well known, such as the herbs used for dyeing and brewing, and those that held a particular cultural importance in the seventeenth century. Featuring exquisite coloured illustrations from John Gerard's herbal of 1597 as well as prints, archival material and manuscripts, this book provides an intriguing and original focus on the domestic history of Stuart England.

This book considers the underlying forces which helped to produce a revolution in seventeenth-century medicine. It shows how in the period between 1630 and 1730 medicine came to represent something more than a marginal activity unrelated to social and intellectual phenomena and also how it was influenced and formed by the same developments in religion, politics, science and commerce which shaped the general history of the seventeenth century. In an attempt to divert the historiography of the subject away from Newton, natural philosophy and the 'scientific revolution', the essays in this volume not only place medicine into a 'context' of political, religious and social change but also explore the dynamics which fashioned the nature of medicine in the age of revolution. Not surprisingly, religion emerges as perhaps the greatest external force for change, colouring most aspects of national and local life and interacting with the growth in the extent of medical knowledge and practice.

Mystical Bedlam explores the social history of insanity of early seventeenth-century England by means of a detailed analysis of the records of Richard Napier, a clergyman and astrological physician, who treated over 2000 mentally disturbed patients between 1597 and 1634. Napier's clients were drawn from every social rank and his therapeutic techniques included all the types of psychological healing practised at the time. His vivid descriptions of his clients' afflictions and complaints illuminate the thoughts and feelings of ordinary people. This book goes beyond simply analysing mental disorder in a seventeenth-century astrological and medical practice. It reveals contemporary attitudes towards family life, describes the appeal of witchcraft and demonology to ordinary villagers, and explains the social and intellectual basis for the eclectic blend of scientific, magical, and religious therapies practised before the English Revolution. Not only is it a contribution to the history of medicine but also a survey of some of the darkest regions of the mental world of the English people of the seventeenth century.

Winner of the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize A new history uncovers the crucial role women played in the great transformations of medical science and health care that accompanied the Italian Renaissance. In Renaissance Italy women played a more central role in providing health care than historians have thus far acknowledged. Women from all walks of life—from household caregivers and nurses to nuns working as apothecaries—drove the Italian medical economy. In convent pharmacies, pox hospitals, girls’ shelters, and homes, women were practitioners and purveyors of knowledge about health and healing, making significant contributions to early modern medicine. Sharon Strocchia offers a wealth of new evidence about how illness was diagnosed and treated, whether by noblewomen living at court or poor nurses living in hospitals. She finds that women expanded on their roles as health care providers by participating in empirical work and the development of scientific knowledge. Nuns, in particular, were among the most prominent manufacturers and vendors of pharmaceutical products. Their experiments with materials and techniques added greatly to the era’s understanding of medical care. Thanks to their excellence in medicine urban Italian women had greater access to commerce than perhaps any other women in Europe. Forgotten Healers provides a more accurate picture of the pursuit of health in Renaissance Italy. More broadly, by emphasizing that the frontlines of medical care are often found in the household and other spaces thought of as female, Strocchia encourages us to rethink the history of medicine.

Drawing upon a myriad of primary and secondary historical sources, The Royal Doctors: Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts investigates the influential individuals who attended England's most important patients during a pivotal epoch in the evolution of the state and the medical profession. Over three hundred men (and a handful of women), heretofore unexamined as a group, made up the medical staff of the Tudor and Stuart kings and queens of England (as well as the Lord Protectorships of Oliver and Richard Cromwell). The royal doctors faced enormous challenges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from diseases that respected no rank and threatened the very security of the realm. Moreover, they had to weather political and religious upheavals that led to regicide and revolution, as well as cope with sharp theoretical and jurisdictional divisions within English medicine. The rulers often interceded in medical controversies at the behest of their royal doctors, bringing sovereign authority to bear on the condition of medicine. Elizabeth Lane Furdell is Professor of History at the University of North Florida.

"Heal Thyself" is the first full biography of Nicholas Culpeper, a 17th century English pioneer of herbal medicine whose actions and beliefs revolutionized medicine and medical practice. 25 line illustrations.

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.