Forgotten Healers Strocchia, Sharon T
2019, 2019-12-17, Letnik:
24
eBook
In Renaissance Italy women from all walks of life played a central role in health care and the early development of medical science. Observing that the frontlines of care are often found in the ...household and other spaces thought of as female, Sharon Strocchia encourages us to rethink women's place in the history of medicine.
Between the mid-fourteenth century and the Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601, English poor relief moved toward a more coherent and comprehensive network of support. Marjorie McIntosh's study, the first to ...trace developments across that time span, focuses on three types of assistance: licensed begging and the solicitation of charitable alms; hospitals and almshouses for the bedridden and elderly; and the aid given by parishes. It explores changing conceptions of poverty and charity and altered roles for the church, state and private organizations in the provision of relief. The study highlights the creativity of local people in responding to poverty, cooperation between national levels of government, the problems of fraud and negligence, and mounting concern with proper supervision and accounting. This ground-breaking work challenges existing accounts of the Poor Laws, showing that they addressed problems with forms of aid already in use rather than creating a new system of relief.
A New World of Animals Asúa, Miguel de; French, Roger
2005, 20170302, 2019, 2017-03-02
eBook
Many Early Modern Europeans who during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries travelled to the New World left written or pictorial records of their encounters with a surprising fauna. The story told ...in this book is woven out of the threads of those texts and pictures. A New World of Animals shows how the initial wonder at the new beasts gave way to a more utilitarian approach, assessing their economic and medical potential. It elucidates how shifts in European perceptions brought the animals from the realm of the fantastic into the mainstream of early modern natural history, while at the same time changing the way in which Europeans saw their own world. Indeed, the chronicles and treatises of those who in the wake of the discovery arrived in the new lands tell as much about the particular interests and mental worlds of the writers as about the 'new animals'. This book traces the amazement of the first explorers and colonizers, the chronicles of soldiers and Indians, the 'natural histories of the New World', the place of animals in the network of economic interests driving the early expansion of Europe, the views of the missionaries and those of natural philosophers and physicians. Taking the reader from the Brazilian forests to the erudite cabinets of the Old World, from Patagonia to the centres of empire, the story of the discovery of the unexpected menagerie of the New World is also an exploration of Early Modern European imagination and learning.
Contents: Preface; Introduction; The unexpected menagerie of the New World; Soldiers and Amerindians; The new histories of the New World; Joyful and profitable news from the New World. Animals, medicine and commerce; Learned missionaries and Jesuit scholars; New World animals and shifting conceptions of natural history; Conclusions; Bibliography; Index.
Miguel de Asúa is Professor at the Universidad Nacional de San Martin and member of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones CientÃficas y Técnicas, Argentina. Dr Roger French was formerly in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, UK.
In the first book to provide a feminist analysis of early modern madness, Carol Thomas Neely reveals the mobility and heterogeneity of discourses of distraction, the most common term for the ...condition in late-sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Distracted Subjects shows how changing ideas of madness that circulated through medical, dramatic, and political texts transformed and gendered subjectivities. Supernatural causation is denied, new diagnoses appear, and stage representations proliferate. Drama sometimes leads and sometimes follows other cultural discourses—or forges its own prophetic figures of distraction. The Spanish Tragedy first links madness to masculine tragic self-representation, and Hamlet invents a language to dramatize feminine somatic illness. Innovative women's melancholy is theorized in medical and witchcraft treatises and then elaborated in the extended portrait of the Jailer's Daughter's distraction in The Two Noble Kinsmen . Lovesickness, newly diagnosed in women, demands novel cures, and allows expressions of transgressive sexual desire in treatises and in plays such as As You Like It. The rituals of possession and exorcism, intensely debated off stage, are mocked and exploited on stage in reiterated comic scenes of confinement that madden men to enhance women's power. Neely's final chapter provides a startling challenge to the critically alluring analogy between Bedlam and the early modern stage by documenting that Bethlem hospital offered care, not spectacle, whereas stage Bedlamites served metatheatrical and prophylactic, not mimetic, ends. An epilogue places this particular historical moment within the longer history of madness and shows how our own attitudes toward distraction are haunted by those earlier debates and representations.
During the Renaissance, collections of letters both satisfied humanist enthusiasm for ancient literary forms and provided the flexibility of a format appropriate to many types of inquiry. The printed ...collections of medical letters by Giovanni Manardo of Ferrara and other physicians in early sixteenth-century Europe may thus be regarded as products of medical humanism. The letters of mid- and late sixteenth-century Italian and German physicians examined in Communities of Learned Experience by Nancy G. Siraisi also illustrate practices associated with the concepts of the Republic of Letters: open and relatively informal communication among a learned community and a liberal exchange of information and ideas. Additionally, such published medical correspondence may often have served to provide mutual reinforcement of professional reputation.
Siraisi uses some of these collections to compare approaches to sharing medical knowledge across broad regions of Europe and within a city, with the goal of illuminating geographic differences as well as diversity within social, urban, courtly, and academic environments of medical learning and practice. The collections she has selected include essays on general medical topics addressed to colleagues or disciples, some advice for individual patients (usually written at the request of the patient’s doctor), and a strong dose of controversy.
This collection of essays contains a wealth of information on the nature of the family in the early modern period. This is a core topic within economic and social history courses which is taught at ...most universities. This text gives readers an overview of how feminist historians have been interpreting the history of the family, ever since Laurence Stone's seminal work FAMILY, SEX AND MARRIAGE IN ENGLAND 1500-1800 was published in 1977.The text is divided into three coherent parts on the following themes: bodies and reproduction; maternity from a feminist perspective; and family relationships. Each part is prefaced by a short introduction commenting on new work in the area.This book will appeal to a wide variety of students because of its sociological, historical and economic foci.
Of enduring historical and contemporary interest, the anatomy theater is where students of the human body learn to isolate structures in decaying remains, scrutinize their parts, and assess their ...importance. Taking a new look at the history of anatomy, Cynthia Klestinec places public dissections alongside private ones to show how the anatomical theater was both a space of philosophical learning, which contributed to a deeper scientific analysis of the body, and a place where students learned to behave, not with ghoulish curiosity, but rather in a civil manner toward their teachers, their peers, and the corpse. Klestinec argues that the drama of public dissection in the Renaissance (which on occasion included musical accompaniment) served as a ploy to attract students to anatomical study by way of anatomy’s philosophical dimensions rather than its empirical offerings. While these venues have been the focus of much scholarship, the private traditions of anatomy comprise a neglected and crucial element of anatomical inquiry. Klestinec shows that in public anatomies, amid an increasingly diverse audience—including students and professors, fishmongers and shoemakers—anatomists emphasized the conceptual framework of natural philosophy, whereas private lessons afforded novel visual experiences where students learned about dissection, observed anatomical particulars, considered surgical interventions, and eventually speculated on the mechanical properties of physiological functions. Theaters of Anatomy focuses on the post-Vesalian era, the often-overlooked period in the history of anatomy after the famed Andreas Vesalius left the University of Padua. Drawing on the letters and testimony of Padua's medical students, Klestinec charts a new history of anatomy in the Renaissance, one that characterizes the role of the anatomy theater and reconsiders the pedagogical debates and educational structure behind human dissection.
What did you do when you fell ill in fifteenth-century Florence? How did you get the medicines that you needed at a price you could afford? What would you find when you entered an apothecary's shop? ...This richly detailed study of the Speziale al Giglio in Florence provides surprising answers, demonstrating the continued importance of highly personalised medical practice late into the fifteenth century.
Castaways ALVAR NÚÑEZ CABEZA DE VACA
04/2023
eBook
This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of
the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author
of Castaways ( Naufragios ), Alvar Núñez Cabeza de
Vaca, was a ...fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an
expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's
Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful
of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with
Hernán Cortés. In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native
peoples along the way, learning their languages and practices and
serving them as a slave and later as a physician. When after eight
years he finally reached the West, he was not recognized by his
compatriots. In his writing Cabeza de Vaca displays great interest
in the cultures of the native peoples he encountered on his
odyssey. As he forged intimate bonds with some of them, sharing
their brutal living conditions and curing their sick, he found
himself on a voyage of self-discovery that was to make his reunion
with his fellow Spaniards less joyful than expected. Cabeza de
Vaca's gripping narrative is a trove of ethnographic information,
with descriptions and interpretations of native cultures that make
it a powerful precursor to modern anthropology. Frances M.
López-Morillas's translation beautifully captures the
sixteenth-century original. Based as it is on Enrique Pupo-Walker's
definitive critical edition, it promises to become the
authoritative English translation.
