'Good gene' mate selection theory proposes that all individuals share evolved mental mechanisms that identify specific parts of a woman's body as indicators of fertility and health. Depiction of feminine beauty, across time and culture, should therefore emphasize the physical traits indicative of health and fertility. Abdominal obesity, as measured by waist size, is reliably linked to decreased...

During the early modern period, medical practitioners came to play an increasingly important role in criminal proceedings throughout continental Europe. Nevertheless, medico-legal procedures Southern or Habsburg Netherlands have hardly received any attention from historians of forensic medicine. The present article aims address this issue by studying how suspicious deaths were investigated Coun...

Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imaginary voyages in the setting of the antipodes were published alongside genuine exploration accounts, and competed with them for the public’s attention. Both offered the novelty of glimpses into strange and exotic distant places and both were concerned with mapping, in painstaking detail, the routes taken and the lands discover...

OCCASIONALLY DOCTORS' letters may be of more interest to medical historians than their published writings. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the elegance of a physician's literary style was often more highly regarded than the astuteness of his clinical observations or the efficacy of his treatment. Medical books tended to be inflated with dubious hypotheses and the few worthwhile reme...

Urban centres exerted a powerful influence on mortality trends in early modern England. The high mortality rates of urban areas created a constant need for new immigrants, drawn from rural populations, and the size and trading functions of towns meant that they functioned as periodic sources of epidemic diseases among the non-urban majority of the population. It is possible that much of the ris...