Making babies was a mysterious process in seventeenth-century England. Fissell uses popular sources - songs, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to recover how ordinary men and women understood the processes of reproduction. Because the human body was so often used as a metaphor for social relations, the grand events of high politics such as the English Civil War reshaped popular ideas about conception and pregnancy. This book is the first account of ordinary people's ideas about reproduction, and offers a new way to understand how common folk experienced the...
Making babies was a mysterious process in seventeenth-century England. Fissell uses popular sources - songs, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks,...
While much is known about the leaders of the medical profession in the eighteenth century, little has been written about rank-and-file practitioners--the apothecaries, blood-letters, and herb-women--or about the patients they treated. Focusing on Bristol, the book examines how the poor gradually lost medical autonomy and authority over their bodies, as the city's hospital was transformed from a charity to a medical workplace by the contingencies of urban apprenticeship and changes in the structure of the city's medical occupations. As hospitals assumed the role of training surgeons and...
While much is known about the leaders of the medical profession in the eighteenth century, little has been written about rank-and-file practitioners--...
