This collection offers readers a guide to analyzing historical texts and objects using a diverse selection of sources in early modern medicine. It provides an array of interpretive strategies while also highlighting new trends in the field. Each chapter serves as a study of a different type of source, including the benefits and limitations of that source and what it can reveal about the history of medicine.

Contributors provide practical strategies for locating and interpreting sources, putting texts and objects into conversation, and explaining potential contradictions. A wide variety of sources, including account books, legal records, and personal letters, provide new opportunities for understanding early modern medicine and developing skills in historical analysis. Together, the chapters highlight emerging methodologies and debates, while covering a range of themes in the field, from reproductive health to hospital care to household medicine.

Contents

Introduction – Olivia Weisser

Part 1: Institutions

1. The Transatlantic Business of Medicine – Zachary Dorner

2. Medicine in the Convent – Sharon T. Strocchia

3. The Curious Case of the Two Antonios: What Hospital Records Can and Cannot Tell Us – Elizabeth W. Mellyn

4. Legal Records in Early Modern Spain – Carolin Schmitz

5. Brotherhoods, Poor Relief, and Healthcare – Laurinda Abreu

Part 2: Medical Writing

6. Medical Casebooks – Lauren Kassell

7. Experimenting with Drugs – Alisha Rankin

8. An Imperial Doctor’s Guide to Bone Setting, 1742 – Yi-Li Wu

9. Physicians’ Treatises: the Ottoman Case – Miri Shefer-Mossensohn

10. Missionary Remedies – Sebestian Kroupa

11. Vernacular Medical Print: Or How to Read a Recipe Book – Elaine Leong 

Part 3: The Everyday

12. Life Writing – Olivia Weisser

13. Family Letters – Sandra Cavallo

14. Newspaper Advertisements from the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean – Elise A. Mitchell

15. Disability History from Slavery’s Archive – Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy

16. Reproducing Ballads – Mary E. Fissell

Part 4: Objects & Images

17. Book Illustrations: Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book – Rebecca Whiteley

18. Medicine Containers and Healing Vessels – Anna Winterbottom

Source: https://www.routledge.com/Early-Modern-Medicine-An-Introduction-to-Source-Analysis/Weisser/p/book/9780367557225