Now for the second offering from Sara Read, this one co-authored by Jennifer Evans. I would like to introduce you to Maladies and Medicine: exploring health and healing 1540-1740. After an introduction that explains the theories underpinning medical practices at the time, the book is arranged on an ailment by ailment basis. The authors look in turn at head complaints, abdominal maladies, whole body ailments and reproductive maladies. Each condition is discussed in terms of ‘causes’, as understood at the time, preventatives and ‘cures’. The authors have used a wide range of contemporary sources, medical treatises, letters, herbals, diaries and case notes, to help the reader understand attitudes to and treatments of, diseases and conditions in the early modern era. The book is enhanced by black and white illustrations and a bibliography of written and online sources.
This is another book that is comprehensible to the interested amateur, whilst being underpinned by serious academic research. The writing style is accessible and amusing at times, although perhaps not for the fainthearted, as historical medical treatments were not pretty. This book had obviously appeal to me in my Mistress Agnes mode and I particularly enjoyed writing the health and medicine chapters in my own Coffers, Clysters, Comfrey and Coifs and Remember Then. The former even has a medical procedure on the cover! When Maladies and Medicine hit the shelves earlier this year, I had no hesitation in adding it to the reading lists for the students on my online In Sickness and in Death – researching the ill-health and death of your ancestors course. It only doesn’t feature in Til Death us do Part: causes of death 1300-1948 (or for ebook fans) because I wrote it before Maladies and Medicine was published.
And in ordinary life, what ever that is, the great cover debate for Barefoot on the Cobbles continues. It now looks very different from yesterday’s version. Amidst addressing Christmas cards and anguishing over cover designs, I have been writing the Barefoot inquest scene and wishing there were forty eight hours in a day.
The History Interpreter - Janet Few 
Janet, I can’t recall if you recommended this book I just started yesterday, but HEAVENS it surely has caught my attention. It’s called “The Effects of Arts, Trades, and Professions on Health and Longevity” by Charles Turner Thackrah, with a story of the life, work, and times of Thackrah by somebody else, a 1989 WH Smith reprint of what was printed during Thackrah’s lifetime 1795 – 1833.Cheap from Abebooks, and it just arrived yesterday.
Just on page 16 I have marked it for the main squeeze, a retired pediatrician, to compare with his medical education, and to note that there is a discussion of the difficulty in obtaining the bodies of paupers for use in dissection, and that Thackrah’s students were not adverse to “resurrection forays in the local burial ground.” Ahem.
On page 26 there was a challenge by a Mr Smith to Mr Thackrah to a public contest in dissection, which was accepted. I shiver when I read some bits of this, and wonder how many of my ancestors may have been subjects ….
Cheers anyway, Brenda
Yes. That was one of mine earlier this month – glad you are ‘enjoying’ it 🙂