John Henderson takes us into the Renaissance hospitals of Florence, recreating the enormous barn-like wards and exploring the lives of those who received and those who administered treatment there.

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.

This is the first study of Renaissance architecture as an immersive, multisensory experience that combines historical analysis with the evidence of first-hand accounts. Questioning the universalizing claims of contemporary architectural phenomenologists, David Karmon emphasizes the infinite variety of meanings produced through human interactions with the built environment. His book draws upon the close study of literary and visual sources to prove that early modern audiences paid sustained attention to the multisensory experience of the buildings and cities in which they lived. Through reconstructing the Renaissance understanding of the senses, we can better gauge how constant interaction with the built environment shaped daily practices and contributed to new forms of understanding. Architecture and the Senses in the Italian Renaissance offers a stimulating new approach to the study of Renaissance architecture and urbanism as a kind of 'experiential trigger' that shaped ways of both thinking and being in the world.

A study in the ideology of wealth and poverty

Brings to light for the first time the innovative healing practices of monasteries and their role in the development of Western medical tradition

Katharine Park has written a social, intellectual, and institutional history of medicine in Florence during the century after the Black Death of 1348. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In the first book devoted to the history of hospital- and asylum-visiting covering the 18th to the late-20th centuries and taking case studies from around the globe, the authors demonstrate that hospitals and asylums could be remarkably permeable institutions.

Argues for more transparent, democratic and safer healthcare practices to keep patients better informed and hold poor-performing doctors and flawed systems accountable.

A century and a half after the Black Death killed over a third of the population of Western Europe, a new plague swept across the continent. The Great Pox - commonly known as the French Disease - brought a different kind of horror: instead of killing its victims rapidly, it endured in their bodies for years, causing acute pain, disfigurement and ultimately an agonising death. The authors analyse the symptoms of the Great Pox and the identity of patients, richly documented in the records of the massive hospital of 'incurables' established in early sixteenth-century Rome. They show how the disease threw accepted medical theory and practice into confusion and provoked public disputations among university teachers. And at the most practical level they reveal the plight of its victims at all levels of society, from ecclesiastical lords to the poor who begged in the streets. Examining a range of contexts from princely courts and republics to university faculties, confraternities and hospitals, the authors argue powerfully for a historical understanding of the Great Pox based on contemporary perceptions rather than on a retrospective diagnosis of what later generations came to know as 'syphilis'.

This is the story of Anita Thomas and Jack Wheaton, two young doctors unwittingly in possession of a designer antibody for the treatment of fibromyalgia syndrome. The new drug is effective, but dangerously flawed. The problem is Anita Thomas has developed a cheap, safe alternative agent. Naturally, after expenditure of a fortune in development, the drug manufactures are not at all pleased with her. The pieces unfold, as we follow Anita and Jack from beautiful upscale midtown to the seedier downtown counterparts of Boston and Atlanta over shadowed by deadly stalkers and embellished by amorous often comically frustrating misadventures. The Renaissance of Aspirin is peppered with industrial espionage, suspense and passion as the chase is on for the first cure for fibromyalgia. Entangled with colorful comrades such as Dasher Clay; Stormi Seales and Khandi Barr in their camp, Anita and Jack barely keep ahead of the treacherous cabal of nemeses; Luciana Velasquez and Jason Brasil led by the Über-villain, Orson Quirk. Paced in the tradition of The Pelican Brief, Coma or a contemporary Maltese Falcon, The Renaissance of Aspirin is both plot and character driven with a ly credible McGuffin at its core. These complex characters are funny, mean, desperate, lonely and at the same time very humanly imperfect. Readers will find their prickly exploits thoroughly entertaining.