Making babies was a mysterious process in early modern England. Mary Fissell employs a wealth of popular sources - ballads, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to ...produce the first account of women's reproductive bodies in early-modern cheap print. Since little was certain about the mysteries of reproduction, the topic lent itself to a rich array of theories. The insides of women's reproductive bodies provided a kind of open interpretive space, a place where many different models of reproductive processes might be plausible. These models were profoundly shaped by cultural concerns; they afforded many ways to discuss and make sense of social, political, and economic changes such as the Protestant Reformation and the Civil War. They gave ordinary people ways of thinking about the changing relations between men and women that characterized these larger social shifts. Fissell offers a new way to think about the history of the body by focusing on women's bodies, showing how ideas about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth were also ways of talking about gender relations and thus all relations of power. Where other histories of the body have focused on learned texts and male bodies, Vernacular Bodies looks at the small books and pamphlets that ordinary people read and listened to - and provides new ways to understand how such people experienced political conflicts and social change.
Consisting of a series of case studies, this book is devoted to the concept and uses of salt in early modern science, which have played a crucial role in the evolution of matter theory from ...Aristotelian concepts of the elements to Newtonian chymistry.
Using historical and anthropological perspectives to examine mind-body relationships in western thought, this book interweaves topics that are usually disconnected to tell a big, important story in ...the histories of medicine, science, philosophy, religion, and political rhetoric. Beginning with early debates during the Scientific Revolution about representation and reality, Martensen demonstrates how investigators such as Vesalius and Harvey sought to transform long-standing notions of the body as dominated by spirit-like humors into portrayals that emphasized its solid tissues. Subsequently, Descartes and Willis and their followers amended this ‘new’ philosophy to argue for the primacy of the cerebral hemispheres and cranial nerves as they downplayed the role of the spirit, passion, and the heart in human thought and behaviour. None of this occurred in a social vacuum, and the book places these medical and philosophical innovations in the context of the religious and political crises of the Reformation and English Civil War and its aftermath. Patrons and their interests are part of the story, as are patients and new formulations of gender. John Locke’s psychology and the emergence in England of a constitutional monarchy figure prominently, as do opponents of the new doctrines of brain and nerves and the emergent social order. The book’s concluding chapter discusses how debates over investigative methods and models of body order that first raged over 300 years ago continue to influence biomedicine and the broader culture today. No other book on western mind-body relationships has attempted this.
First part of the book presents a unique and coherent study of natural amputations due to congenital absence, disease, frostbite, toxins, domestic and wild animal trauma, and non-medical reasons ...related to punitive, ritual and legal decisions. Following the introduction of gun powder in the 15th century, surgical action became significant. The subsequent development of surgical amputation and its difficulties form a major part of the book, summarising the evolution of the control of haemorrhage and infection, pain relief, techniques, instrumentation, complications, prostheses, results and case histories. In addition, alternative procedures, increasingly important in the last two centuries, are debated and factors associated with self-amputation in extremis, not as rare according to press reports, are also examined.This richly illustratedbook will be of interest to medical and social historians, surgeons, limb-fitting surgeons and prosthetists, anaesthetists, limb manufacturers, social historians, ethnologists and amputees.
Spanish text, with English translation, of Prado's Relación of the voyage begun in company with Quirós and Torres in 1607, together with a report of the Spanish Council of State concerning Quir¢s, ...1618, and letters of Torres and Prado, 1607-13. Contents: New light on the discovery of Australia.-Note on Prado's Relación.-Relación de don Diego de Prado (Spanish and English)-Appendices: I. Report of Council of State with letter of Luis Vaez de Torres (Spanish and English) II. Mr. Barwick's translations of Prado's two letters sent from Goa in 1613. III. Mr. Barwick's translations of the legends on the four Prado maps. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1930. Owing to technical constraints it has not been possible to reproduce the "Facsimiles of the Four Prado Maps" which appeared in the first edition of the work.
Uncovers an artistic puzzle in the illusionist paintings by Edward Collier, a Dutch-British still-life painter who moved to London at the end of the seventeenth century and encoded a sophisticated ...critique of the information revolution that ushered in the modern information age.
