Claudia Stein - Böcker

This book explores the identity of the 'French disease' (alias the 'French pox' or 'Morbus Gallicus') in the German Imperial city of Augsburg between 1495 and 1630. Rejecting the imposition of modern conceptions of disease upon the past, it reveals how early modern medical theory facilitated enormous flexibility in defining disease, and how disease identification was a local matter, and one of constant negotiation and renegotiation. Drawing on a wealth of primary source material this work combines concern with the conceptualisation of the disease with its practical application, and argues for the inseparability of both. It focuses on how theoretical understanding of the pox shaped the various therapeutic reactions, and vice versa. It exemplifies this in the specific socio-cultural context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Augsburg, through an investigation of the city's municipal and private pox hospitals. Combining medical, religious, economic, municipal and institutional history this book offers a fascinating insight into how early modern society came to terms with disease both in a practical and theoretical sense. This revised English translation of Dr Stein's original German book adds new layers of understanding to a fascinating but complex subject.

The history of medicine has been a robust field of academic inquiry and popular discussion since the 1970s. The interest in it goes back much further, but it was then that it began to link up with social protest and the counter-culture movement, and with feminist politics in particular. Medicine was seen as a part of ‘the Establishment’, perceived to be anti-democratic and paternalistic. The blossoming of the social history of medicine was launched on this agenda, focusing on the historically disenfranchised: the mad, women, the disabled, ‘unorthodox’ healers, social medicine, and so on. The field expanded in the 1980s and 90s with a shift from ‘the social’ to the ‘the cultural history of medicine’, connecting it to an abiding interest in ‘the body’. The centrality of medicine and the body to the work of Michel Foucault was a part of that move. Today, interest is sustained through the politics of biomedicine (including bioethics, and the turn to the ‘neuro’), which render it one of the most vibrant areas in the academy and one of the most topical in popular culture.

This book explores the identity of the 'French disease' (alias the 'French pox' or 'Morbus Gallicus') in the German Imperial city of Augsburg between 1495 and 1630. Rejecting the imposition of modern conceptions of disease upon the past, it reveals how early modern medical theory facilitated enormous flexibility in defining disease, and how disease identification was a local matter, and one of constant negotiation and renegotiation. Drawing on a wealth of primary source material this work combines concern with the conceptualisation of the disease with its practical application, and argues for the inseparability of both. It focuses on how theoretical understanding of the pox shaped the various therapeutic reactions, and vice versa. It exemplifies this in the specific socio-cultural context of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Augsburg, through an investigation of the city's municipal and private pox hospitals. Combining medical, religious, economic, municipal and institutional history this book offers a fascinating insight into how early modern society came to terms with disease both in a practical and theoretical sense. This revised English translation of Dr Stein's original German book adds new layers of understanding to a fascinating but complex subject.

Since the ‘cultural turn’ of the 1980s the history of Renaissance medicine has been radically transformed, with older narratives stood on their head as concepts and categories for research have been re-thought. At the core of this change – for the period now familiarly referred to (not insignificantly) as ‘early modern’ – stands an epistemological reconsideration of the production of natural knowledge, and of power in relation to the core of medicine’s subject, the human body. Additionally, at issue are the origins of modernity itself. Building on the foundations of this historiographical transformation, the essays in this volume elaborate, refine and challenge what are now standard interpretations in the study of medicine and the body in the early modern period. They broaden the scope of study through exploration of the contact zones between European knowledges and practices with other indigenous cultures. They draw attention to the riches of early modern material and visual culture as they take stock of how key epistemological notions for the study and practice of medicine, such as ‘experience’ and ‘authority’, were shaped and redefined. Moreover, essays on such topics as food, animals, environment, and mind and brain demonstrate how the cultural turn has revived and given new urgency to themes long central to the study of sickness and health. Wetting appetites and distilling the recent past, these essays work collectively to remind readers that the ‘cultural turn’ is far from over.