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Kitchen alchemy in the 16th century
Since late antiquity, alchemical texts have had a reputation for being difficult to read. Besides often being written in Latin, which automatically limited the readership, these treatises employed a hermetic language, following the tradition of the secrecy of esoteric knowledge.… 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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Rediscovering the gut-mind connection
The gut-mind relationship is currently undergoing a renaissance. In the past decade, biomedical science has been drawing increasingly compelling links between mental health and the gastrointestinal tract. Conditions such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome are being linked to mental illness, and… Continue reading
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The Vesalius Census: the reception history of the ‘Fabrica’ from 1543 to 2016
The next seminar in the 2016–17 History of Pre-Modern Medicine seminar series takes place on Tuesday 28 February. Speaker: Dr Dániel Margócsy (University of Cambridge) From its very beginnings, Andreas Vesalius’ ‘De humani corporis fabrica’ of 1543, this most fabulous of anatomy atlases,… Continue reading
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History of Pre-Modern Medicine seminar series, Spring 2017
The History of Pre-Modern Medicine seminar series returns this month. The 2016–17 series – organised by a group of historians of medicine based at London universities and hosted by the Wellcome Library – will conclude with three seminars. The series… 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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The melancholy earl: emotion, medicine and the body in 17th-century England
The first seminar in the 2016–17 History of Pre-Modern Medicine seminar series takes place on Tuesday 11th October. Speaker: Dr Erin Sullivan (University of Birmingham) The melancholy earl: emotion, medicine and the body in 17th-century England Abstract: What did melancholy look like… Continue reading
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Incunabula and medicine: a report
On Friday 20 May 2016, the Wellcome Library hosted a workshop (for the programme, see a previous post) that aimed to bring about new discussions on incunabula, the earliest printed books, and medicine. This was the first time that the… Continue reading
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Bawling babies and their baths in early modern England
Galenic and Hippocratic medical traditions did not see all bodies as the same. Indeed, recent work by Hannah Newton has shown that early modern physicians treated and perceived children as ‘physiologically distinct’ from adults. Children, including infants, were moist, warm… Continue reading