Ancient and Historical Medical Texts in Translation: Secondary Sources

Shows how 18th-century ideas of “seasoning” explained why Britons fell ill in foreign climates, tying disease to place, race, and gender. Medical debates shaped imperial power and arguments over slavery, revealing how medicine, race, and empire mutually reinforced one another.

Brings together the histories of European medicine, gender, and Christianity to re-embed women's participation in medieval healthcare. Using devotional manuscripts, hagiographical texts, liturgy, poetry, and medical treatises, it reveals the healthcare knowledge and caregiving practices of Cistercian nuns and beguines in the late medieval Lowlands.

Interpreting quackery -- Medical entrepreneurship in the consumer society -- The career of quackery -- The culture of quackery -- Images of health, disease, and cure -- Quacks and sex : pioneering or anxiety making? -- The quarrel of the quacks -- Profession, fringe and quackery : the nineteenth-century transition.

Amid war, famine, and plague, an outcast finds purpose in healing with plants and herbs. Working outside official control, he uses herbal knowledge to challenge elite medical powers, joining the underground movements reshaping science, society, and politics.

Simon Forman (1552-1611) is one of London's most infamous astrologers. Whilst he was consulted thousands of times a year for medical and other questions he stood apart from the medical elite as he boldly asserted medical ideas that were at odds with most learned physicians. In this fascinating book, Lauren Kassell vividly recovers the world of medicine and magic in Elizabethan London.

This work offers the first book-length study of early modern European noblewomen as healers. Drawing on rich archival sources, it shows how German noblewomen made and shared medicines, gained renown, and practiced pharmacy because of their gender, linking healing to charity, class, religion, household roles, and early scientific knowledge.

In this provocative study Barbara Duden asserts that the most basic biological and medical terms that we use to describe our own bodies―male and female, healthy or sick―are indeed cultural constructions. Duden delves into the records of an eighteenth-century German physician who meticulously documented the medical histories of eighteen hundred women of all ages and backgrounds, often in their own words. This unparalleled record of complaints, symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments reveals a deeply alien understanding of the female body and its functions.

Excerpts from Buddhist sacred works extensively quoted throughout the book along with citations to original sources.

A study of Byzantine xenôn medical texts (9th–13th c.) analyzes their structure, manuscript evidence, and links to hospital practice. Comparing them with other late medical manuals, it highlights shared and differing features and assesses their role in shaping medieval healthcare.