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SUMMARY:'Nature concocts and expels': recovery from illness in early moder
 n England\, 1580–1720 - Hannah Newton (Department of History and Philoso
 phy of Science)
DTSTART:20130509T153000Z
DTEND:20130509T170000Z
UID:TALK44695@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Helen Curry
DESCRIPTION:The historiography of early modern medicine often makes depres
 sing reading. It implies that people fell sick\, took ineffective remedies
 \, and died. My paper seeks to rebalance our picture of health at this tim
 e\, by investigating recovery from illness. Drawing on sources such as dia
 ries\, doctors' casebooks\, and medical texts\, it asks how physicians and
  laypeople defined and explained recovery\, and examines the care of the r
 ecovering patient. These questions have rarely been addressed\, despite th
 e widespread use of terms such as 'cure' and 'recover' by scholars. I show
  that in Galenic and Hippocratic traditions\, recovery meant the complete 
 'away-taking of the Disease'\, and restoration of 'pristine health'. It wa
 s driven by 'Nature'\, under the direction of God\, and with the assistanc
 e of medicine. Nature was depicted as a 'homely woman' who removed illness
  by cooking the bad humours and washing them from the body – processes c
 alled 'concoction' and 'expulsion'. But she was also a 'princely soldier'\
 , who fought and defeated the disease. I suggest that this double-genderin
 g of Nature enabled patients and practitioners of both sexes to engage in 
 gender construction during recovery. Whilst some work has been conducted o
 n the roles of God and medicine\, the vital force of Nature has been large
 ly overlooked. The paper also sheds light on a number of wider issues\, su
 ch as definitions of disease and health\, and concepts of age and gender.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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