Early Modern Themes: medicine and illness

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Medicine and Illness

Plague and public health in Renaissance Europe a hypertext archive 'documenting the arrival, impact and response to the problem of epidemic disease in Western Europe between 1348 and 1530' (currently only fourteenth-century examples)

Burial of the plague dead in early modern London (Vanessa Harding) part of Epidemic Disease in London, a collection of papers, some focused on the early modern period, from an Institute of Historical Research Symposium held in 1992

John Graunt's Observations on the Bills of Mortality (Ed Stephan) full text of this 1662 work - a remarkable early piece of statistical analysis

A Journal of the Plague Year (Gutenberg Project) Defoe's 1722 account of the Great Plague of 1664/5 - without the terrible flashing banner ads that had taken over my previous link to this text (http://www.mastertexts.com/Defoe_Daniel/A_Journal_of_the_Plague_Year/Index.htm)

Herbal Medicine in Shakespeare's England (Michael Tierra) article on John Hall, a sixteenth-century physican-herbalist

Elizabeth Blackwell and her 'Curious Herbal' (British Library) online exhibit based on the British Library's copy of Elizabeth Blackwell's Curious Herbal containing five hundred cuts of the most useful plants, published in 1737

Islamic culture and the medical arts: late medieval and early modern medicine (US National Library of Medicine) looks at European influences on early modern Islamic medicine and vice versa

Words and deeds of madness in eighteenth-century France (Laurent Cartayrade) a remarkable bilingual (French and English) site, containing excerpts from the records of a legal process known as interdiction: the appointment of a guardian to look after the insane or mentally impaired. The extracts are taken from petitions, interviews and inquiries into individual cases, 'sometimes utterly banal, sometimes mysterious, sometimes tragic'

The Diary of Martha Ballard (Film Study Center, Harvard University) at the heart of this sophisticated site is the diary (of over 1400 pages) kept by Martha Ballard, a late eighteenth-century midwife and healer in Massachusetts. There is also an archive of primary sources used in the project, which can be browsed in a variety of ways including topic headings (which include: domestic life; religion; law and justice; midwifery and birth). But it's also a superb teaching resource - not only does it offer practice in reading handwriting, it also has guided exercises in such crucial historical skills as the interpretation of conflicting evidence, and an excellent section on the use of primary sources

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This page last updated 16 January 2004 by Sharon Howard

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