Reading and Viewing Sex in Early Modern French Vernacular Medicine

‘Herbals she peruseth’: reading medicine in early modern England

In 1631, Richard Brathwaite penned a conduct manual for 'English Gentlewomen'. In Brathwaite's mind, the ideal English gentlewoman was not only chaste, modest and honourable but also an avid reader. In fact, Brathwaite specifically recommends English gentlewomen to first peruse herbals and then to deepen their medical knowledge via conference. Centred on the manuscript notebooks of two late sev...

Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe

"Professionalizing modern medicine" in French hospitals. Essay review.

historians' interest in death has been highly selective. None has yet given us a broad survey, grounded in the history of ideas, of how the medical profession's attitudes towards death and the treatment of the dying has been congruent with or divergent from those of other educated and professional groups such as judges and priests. Moreover, we also know little about how the practical and ethic...

Pre-Modern and Early Modern Persian Literature: Written while Travelling?

In literary histories written in both Iran and the West it has generally be assumed that early modern Persian literary works are (technically inferior) copies of Western literary works. This has been and is still a claim. Almost no academically and scientifically sound works has substantiated this claim. While there is no point in denying a European influence on early modern Persian literature,...

The legacy of Islamic world in modern medicine and science

The legacy of the Islamic world in medicine and natural science is the legacy of Greece, increased by many additions, mostly practical. Rhazes, the Iranian, was a talented clinical observer, but not a Harvey. Abd al-Latif, the Arab, was a diligent seeker in anatomy, but in no way to be compared to Vesalius. The Muslims possessed excellent translations of the works of the Hippocratic Corpus and ...