STS Research Seminar - Dr Elaine Leong (UCL History / Max Planck Institute) - Weds 6th March 2019

On Wednesday 6th March, Dr Elaine Leong of UCL History and the Max Planck Institute will visit the departmentto give her talk on 'Learning medicine by the book in early modern England'. The talk will begin at 4.30pm in Malet Place Engineering Building room 1.2, with refreshments from 4pm.

Abstract:

Vernacular medical print flourished in early modern Europe. By the mid- to late seventeenth century, English readers accessed a wide range of medical books, priced to suit almost all budgets. Some titles stacked on London booksellers’ shelves were instructional and offered a variety of health-related know-how from first aid to simple surgeries to medicine production. Others, such as pharmacopoeia or dictionaries, were geared towards standardising knowledge and practice. Focusing on book production, past studies have sketched out the general contours of English medical print and have argued that many early modern men and women gained substantial knowledge about health and the body through books. This paper extends these studies by asking what it means to learn medicine from books. I begin by contextualizing the rich corpus of vernacular medical manuals and handbooks within a broader history of instructional literature, examining “medicine by the book” alongside cognate practices in other knowledge fields. Then, taking tools developed by historians of the book, I examine paratextual materials to unpack how these books were designed to be used and read. Finally, I analyse marginal annotations and marks to recover how actual readers engaged with and appropriated the knowledge from different kinds of medical books. In doing so, I aim to further elucidate and understand the informal transfer of health-related knowledge and skills in the early modern period.