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Physick and the family offers new insights into the early modern sickness experience, through a study of the medical history of Wales.
This first ever monograph of early modern Welsh medicine utilises a large body of newly discovered source material, numerous approaches and methodologies and makes a significant contribution to debates in medical history; including economies of knowledge, domestic medicine and care, material culture and the rural medical marketplace. Drawing on sources from probates to parish records, diaries to domestic remedy collections, Withey offers new directions for recovering the often obscure medical worldview of the ‘ordinary’ person.
This innovative study will appeal to anyone interested in the social history of the early modern period. Its multi-disciplinary approach will appeal to a broad spectrum of academics and scholars, and will enhance a range of courses and modules both in medical history and in social history more widely.
Alun Withey's first book is a wide-ranging and spirited, yet also rounded and original contribution to the social history of British...Withey has achieved more than enough already in this valuable and often fascinating book.'
Robert Allan Houston, Social History of Medicine, vol 25, no 3,
'This very welcome book is brimming full of suggestions setting medical history in a rich new context. It will also give historians of Wales itself and their students plenty to think about, and to argue with. The bibliography is excellent.'
Michael Roberts, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2012, 86
Short-listed for 2013 the Longman / History Today Book of the Year award
Appendices
Introduction
I. Disease and mortality in early modern Wales
1. ‘Fruits of sin, forerunners of dissolution’: sickness and disease in early modern Wales
II. Medical knowledge in early modern Wales
2. The Welsh body and popular medical culture
3. Medicine, oral and print culture
4. An economy of knowledge: social networks and the spread of medical information
III. Domestic sickness and care in the Welsh home
5. Care and the Welsh medical home
6. Sickness experience and the ‘sick role'
7. Caring for the sick
8. ‘Neighbourliness’ and the medical community
9. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index