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Plague in Italy and Europe during the 17th century
The next seminar in the 2017–18 History of Pre-Modern Medicine seminar series takes place on Tuesday 30 January. Speaker: Professor Guido Alfani (Bocconi University, Milan) Plague in Italy and Europe during the 17th century: epidemiology and impact Abstract: After many years of relative… Continue reading
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Finding lost science in early modern poetry
Workshop: Finding lost science in early modern poetry Wednesday 22 November 2017, Wellcome Library, Wellcome Collection Didactic poetry of the early modern period can reveal fascinating insights about what people of the time thought about science and how they expressed… Continue reading
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Ambroise Paré’s medical ‘monsters’
In the collected works of Ambroise Paré (c. 1510–90), first published in French in 1575, a ‘Book of monsters and prodigies’ appears alongside other subjects including the setting of bones, the identification of parasites, and the treatment of wounds. Paré,… Continue reading
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‘Aristotle”s bestselling sex manual
Sex, childbirth and reproductive health were topics of considerable interest to people in early modern England. The Wellcome Library has a substantial collection of different editions of a hugely popular printed work addressing these issues in 17th- and 18th-century England,… Continue reading
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Images on the move in Mauriceau’s ‘The diseases of women’
Looking through copies of ‘The diseases of women with child and in child-bed’, the English translation of the seminal work on midwifery by François Mauriceau (1637–1709) first published in French in 1668, I noticed something distinctive. While in some editions… Continue reading
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Barberries, saffron and almond milk: the flavours of 2015 … and 1662
Holly Story from the Library’s media team has been delving in to one of our many historical recipe books. Here’s what she discovered from the point of view of a curious cook rather than an historian or archivist. In the… Continue reading
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Spotlight: a solitary survivor of the Great Plague
The Great Plague that afflicted London 350 years ago (1665–66) had a dramatic impact on the city, killing up to 100,000 people of a population that then numbered about 460,000. There was a plethora of printed responses to this plague… Continue reading
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Descartes and doubt
Ed Thornton draws on the Library’s original publications by René Descartes (1596–1650) to discover what the French polymath’s adage “I think therefore I am” can tell us about what it means to be a thinking thing in a physical world.… Continue reading
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Royal proclamations: King Charles II and beyond
We have recently finished cataloguing a small collection of 18 royal proclamations dating from the reigns of King Charles II (1662), through William and Mary to Anne (1702). Part of the Library’s ephemera collection, the proclamations have a similar overall… Continue reading
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A dissertation by any other name…
The Wellcome Library possesses a rare collection of early medical student dissertations, acquired from the Medical Society of London in 1984. Access was by handwritten card catalogue for many years, but we are now adding records to the online catalogues.… Continue reading