From the category archives:

Health and Healing

Do you smell that?

By David S. Barnes
In the late summer of 1880, a wave of offensive odors descended upon the city of Paris. For just over two months, between late July and early October of that year, Parisians complained of the putrid, insufferable stench. The tone of many reactions was apocalyptic: “[T]he odors are truly unbearable”; [...]

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Feeling Swinish: Or the Origins of “Pandemic”

By Holly Tucker
And here I thought that regular bathing in Purell would spare me from H1N1. A quixotic illusion, it turns out, for someone who teaches and has a grade-schooler. In the midst of mild fever, I started thinking about the origins of the term pandemic…
The seventeenth-century physician Gideon Harvey (no relation to William Harvey, [...]

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C-Sections Before Anesthesia

By Holly Tucker
C-sections were the surgery of very last resort and rarely performed until the mid-to-late eighteenth century. While they were not common, this does not mean that the procedure did not take up good-sized sections of obstetrics texts. In fact, the more difficult and horrific the procedure…the more often you’ll get to read about [...]

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Midwives and Witches

by Bronwyn Backstrom (Vanderbilt University)
The ideas of witches and witchcraft have been around for centuries and were hot topics. Witches were typically identified as older single women of lower class. Throughout history, there has been a stereotype that only women, specifically midwives and other women-healers, were witches. Women were targets because of the tradition of [...]

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Medical Curiosities, Authorial Resources

By Kirsten Menger-Anderson
Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain began as a short story about phrenology. I was fascinated by the odd idea of determining personality from the bumps in our heads, and intrigued by the diagrams of crisscrossed heads containing “brain organs” ranging from poetic talent to the tendency to murder. What other (now discredited) medical [...]

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The King’s Midwife

by Allyn Bures

Angelique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray, midwife to the nation of France, holds a substantial position in the history of early modern medicine. Mme du Coudray is most famous for her revolutionary midwifery teaching techniques, including an incredibly detailed textbook and lifelike machines utilized to simulate childbirth (1).

As a practicing [...]

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Women’s Medical Secrets

by Renee Hanemann (Vanderbilt University)

Queen Elizabeth I, the queen of England and Ireland in the late 16th century, was a public participant in what was usually considered women’s secret, private household medical practice. She helped to create broader public recognition of women’s medical knowledge with the publication of “Closset of Secrets.” The “secrets” [...]

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