The Popularization of Medicine explores the rise of this form of people's medicine, from the early days of printing to the Victorian age, focusing upon the different experiences of Britain and France, more marginal European nations like Spain and Hungary, and upon North America.

In the early modern centuries a body of popularized medical writings appeared, telling ordinary people how they could best take care of their own health. Often written be doctors, such books gave simple advice for home treatments, while commonly warning of the dangers of magic, quackery, old wive's tales and faith-healing. The Popularization of Medicine explores the rise of this form of people's medicine, from the early days of printing to the Victorian age, focusing on the different experiences of Britain, the Continent and North America.

Although ancient and medieval doctors knew of the disorder called diabetes, the disease they treated was rare and largely confined to young sufferers. By the late Renaissance, however, the increasing incidence of diabetes in older adults required a re-examination of what caused the malady and how to cure it. Led by English healers, such as controversial apothecary Nicholas Culpeper and elite physician Thomas Willis, the study of diabetes produced significant debate in print over the locus of the disease and remedies for its treatment. These debates paralleled the growing schism in English medical circles over contradictory iatric theories and professional jurisdiction. On the eve of insulin's discovery, diabetologists still quarrelled over what diets might alleviate its symptoms. Including perspectives from patients and drawing on myriad sources, this book examines changing approaches to diabetes and its victims within the context of medical and scientific progress.

This innovative new book is overtly and explicitly about female agency in eighteenth-century European towns. However, it positions female activity and decisions unequivocally in an urban world of institutions, laws, regulations, customs and ideologies. Gender politics complicated and shaped the day-to-day experiences of working women. Town rules and customs, as well as police and guilds’ regulations, affected women’s participation in the urban economy: most of the time, the formally recognized and legally accepted power of women – which is an essential component of female agency – was very limited. Yet these chapters draw attention to how women navigated these gendered terrains. As the book demonstrates, "exclusion" is too strong a word for the realities and pragmatism of women’s everyday lives. Frequently guild and corporate regulations were more about situating women and regulating their activities, rather than preventing them from operating in the urban economy. Similarly corporate structures, which were under stress, found flexible strategies to incorporate women who through their own initiative and activities put pressure on the systems. Women could benefit from the contradictions between moral and social unwritten norms and economic regulations, and could take advantage of the tolerance or complicity of urban authorities towards illicit practices. Women with a grasp of their rights and privileges could defend themselves and exploit legal systems with its loopholes and contradictions to achieve economic independence and power.

Gout has been seen as a disease afflicting upper-class males of superior wit, genius and creativity. It is also believed to protect its sufferers and assure long life. This study investigates the history of gout and offers a perspective on medical and social history, sex, prejudice and class.

This text, written by members of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine and first published in 1995, is designed to cover the history of western medicine from classical antiquity to 1800. As one guiding thread it takes, as its title suggests, the system of medical ideas that in large part went back to the Greeks of the eighth century BC, and played a major role in the understanding and treatment of health and disease. Its influence spread from the Aegean basin to the rest of the Mediterranean region, to Europe, and then to European settlements overseas. By the nineteenth century, however, this tradition no longer carried the same force or occupied so central a position within medicine. This book charts the influence of this tradition, examining it in its social and historical context. It is essential reading as a synthesis for all students of the history of medicine.

"In this wide-ranging book, Nina Etkin reveals the medicinal properties of foods in the specific cultural contexts in which they are used. Incorporating co-evolution with a biocultural perspective, she addresses some of the physiological effects of foods across cultures and through history while taking into account both the complex dynamics of food choice and the blurred distinctions between food and medicine. Showing that food choice is more closely linked to health than is commonly thought, she helps us to understand the health implications of people's food-centered actions in the context of real-life circumstances."--Jacket.

How hunger shaped both colonialism and Native resistance in Early America "In this bold and original study, Cevasco punctures the myth of colonial America as a land of plenty. This is a book about the past with lessons for our time of food insecurity."--Peter C. Mancall, author of The Trials of Thomas Morton Carla Cevasco reveals the disgusting, violent history of hunger in the context of the colonial invasion of early northeastern North America. Locked in constant violence throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Native Americans and English and French colonists faced the pain of hunger, the fear of encounters with taboo foods, and the struggle for resources. Their mealtime encounters with rotten meat, foraged plants, and even human flesh would transform the meanings of hunger across cultures. By foregrounding hunger and its effects in the early American world, Cevasco emphasizes the fragility of the colonial project, and the strategies of resilience that Native peoples used to endure both scarcity and the colonial invasion. In doing so, the book proposes an interdisciplinary framework for studying scarcity, expanding the field of food studies beyond simply the study of plenty.

Novel Bodies examines how disability shapes the British literary history of sexuality. Jason Farr shows that various eighteenth-century novelists represent disability and sexuality in flexible ways to reconfigure the political and social landscapes of eighteenth-century Britain. In imagining the lived experience of disability as analogous to—and as informed by—queer genders and sexualities, the authors featured in Novel Bodies expose emerging ideas of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality as interconnected systems that sustain dominant models of courtship, reproduction, and degeneracy. Further, Farr argues that they use intersections of disability and queerness to stage an array of contemporaneous debates covering topics as wide-ranging as education, feminism, domesticity, medicine, and plantation life. In his close attention to the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Sarah Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Frances Burney, Farr demonstrates that disabled and queer characters inhabit strict social orders in unconventional ways, and thus opened up new avenues of expression for readers from the eighteenth century forward. Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.