Sexual underworlds of the Enlightenment

Abstract

Reviewsreceipts", for instance, appear in the same form in learned treatises, manuscript collections of recipes, and in oral tradition.The book ends with a case study in the popular medicine of the time, by looking at women's work as medical practitioners.Nagy illustrates very clearly how women, especially charitable gentlewomen, were not mere nurses but undertook the treatment of the most difficult cases.There are problems with the book: inevitably, the evidence about popular healing comes from the literate and well-to-do part of the population, who might be said to share a common outlook with regular practitioners.Whether the majority of the population had its own medical culture in seventeenth-century England is a question that neither Nagy nor any other historian has succeeded in answering.Lucinda Beier's Sufferers and healers covers rather similar ground, but Nagy's book will be useful as a student text.It has drawn on a wealth of primary material and has a good bibliography.Finally, one should add that the book was originally a master's thesis and has the enthusiasm and iconoclasm often associated with postgradute research and, now alas too rarely, with North America.Historians such as Charles Webster and Walter Pagel are roundly taken to task for their Whiggishness in concentrating on great names and male practitioners, though the duo of Margaret Pelling and Roy Porter do receive due praise for their work on the social history of medicine.

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