This book invites readers into the lives and imaginations of ordinary people and their experiences of illness in early modern England. Previous scholarship has revised our understanding of medicine in this period by revealing the significant ways patients structured medical care. Sufferers’ choices, actions, and words played a crucial role in determining healers’ diagnoses and treatments. However, much of that earlier work has overlooked how everyday lived experiences, such as gender relations and roles, shaped the medical encounter. Drawing on firsthand accounts of illness in letters and diar ... More

This book invites readers into the lives and imaginations of ordinary people and their experiences of illness in early modern England. Previous scholarship has revised our understanding of medicine in this period by revealing the significant ways patients structured medical care. Sufferers’ choices, actions, and words played a crucial role in determining healers’ diagnoses and treatments. However, much of that earlier work has overlooked how everyday lived experiences, such as gender relations and roles, shaped the medical encounter. Drawing on firsthand accounts of illness in letters and diaries, as well as petitions, devotional literature, and medical casebooks, this is the first book to show how early modern sufferers understood and experienced their bodies in gendered ways. Women tended to emphasize the impact of personal relationships on their bodies, looking to others to understand or articulate their own illnesses. Many ailing men placed the social in the context of credit relations rather than affective relations, and highlighted their own physical processes. The book offers evidence of this broad pattern in a range of ways—in the stories patients told to make sense of their illnesses, in their explanations of illness onset, and in their articulations of suffering, time, and pain. Examining these cultural processes deepens our understanding of early modern health and healing, as well as gendered experiences more broadly.