Medicine, Madness and the Maternal Body in Sixteenth-Century Europe

This book traces the early modern medical engagement with what was often termed as ‘postpartum madness.’ It offers a new consideration of how mental disturbances were perceived and treated by university-trained physicians over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By focusing on the Western Latin print tradition, it challenges the conventional historical narrative that has often omitted the progress which occurred during this period, in favour of a synopsis that passes from the works of Hippocrates (c.460 BCE – c.375 BCE) straight to the scholarly advancements of the nineteenth century. This study draws on both theoretical treatises and clinical case histories to uncover the ways in which physicians identified, discussed, and attempted to manage mental illnesses which arose in the wake of childbirth. It explores how these conditions were conceptualised within the leading medical humoral framework, how they were connected to broader understandings of female physiology, and how childbirth itself was thought to provoke episodes of mental alienation. This research brings into focus a largely overlooked chapter in the history of reproductive health, revealing the depth of sophistication with which early modern physicians approached the fragile boundary between body and mind in the aftermath of birth.