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Background: Andreas Vesalius published his famous anatomy book, De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septum (On the Fabric of the Body in Seven Books), in 1543, with a second edition in 1555. This article explores the importance of this text to contemporary ENT, by demonstrating Vesalius' fresh, precise and hands-on approach to anatomy, and examines how this developed our understanding of ENT., Methods: A second edition of De Humani Corporis Fabrica , held in John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, was examined in its digitised form and supplemented by secondary texts., Results and Discussion: Where Vesalius' predecessors were rigid in their interpretation of anatomy, confined to the instruction of the Ancients, Vesalius showed that these teachings could be analysed and built on with careful observation. This is evident in his illustrations of, and annotations on, the skull base, ossicles and thyroid gland.

Objective: For centuries, the tympanum has remained the only visible structure of the organ of hearing. This study aimed to trace the understanding of the tympanic membrane from antiquity to the early twentieth century., Methods: A review was conducted of primary and secondary historical and scientific literature describing the tympanic membrane anatomy., Results: Although ancient polymaths sensed that sounds were vibrations that could spread in the air and be perceived by the hearing organ, there were numerous misconceptions about the tympanum until human dissections performed during the Renaissance. The tympanum was correctly described only centuries later when technological advances enabled otologists to understand it as a fundamental part of the hearing organ., Conclusion: The tympanic membrane history reflects key stages in medical knowledge; limited for centuries, a great technological leap was possible in the nineteenth century, contributing to the emergence of otologists and laying the foundations of modern otology.

Background: Nasal lavage is an ancient practice that still has a fundamental role in the management of sinonasal conditions. The history related to these devices is extensive and remarkable. By reviewing it, it is hoped that a broader view can be achieved on what is currently possible with nasal lavage and how advances may be made in the future., Methods: A careful review of different sources, such as ancient manuscripts, registered patents and scientific papers, was conducted to achieve a thorough examination of the history related to nasal rinsing devices., Conclusion: Nasal lavage has evolved significantly since first considered for medical use and has always played a central role in the treatment of patients with sinonasal conditions. Further innovation is still necessary to surmount the shortcomings of current nasal lavage systems.

Objectives: This paper seeks to provide a brief overview of epidemics and pandemics in Irish history and to identify any lessons that might be useful in relation to psychiatry in the context of COVID-19., Methods: A review of selected key reports, papers and publications related to epidemics and pandemics in Irish history was conducted., Results: Viruses, epidemics and pandemics are recurring features of human history. Early Irish sources record a broad array of plagues, pandemics and epidemics including bubonic plague, typhus, cholera, dysentery and smallpox, as well as an alleged epidemic of insanity in the 19th century (that never truly occurred). Like the Spanish flu pandemic (1918-20), COVID-19 (a new coronavirus) presents both the challenge of the illness itself and the problems caused by the anxiety that the virus triggers. Managing this anxiety has always been a challenge, especially with the Spanish flu. People with mental illness had particularly poor outcomes with the Spanish flu, often related to the large, unhygienic mental hospitals in which so many were housed., Conclusions: Even today, a full century after the Spanish flu pandemic, people with mental illness remain at increased risk of poor physical health, so it is imperative that multi-disciplinary care continues during the current outbreak of COVID-19, despite the manifest difficulties involved. The histories of previous epidemics and pandemics clearly demonstrate that good communication and solidarity matter, now more than ever, especially for people with mental illness.

The aim of this study is to determine the species of parasite that infected the population of Brussels during the Medieval and Renaissance periods, and determine if there was notable variation between different households within the city. We compared multiple sediment layers from cesspits beneath three different latrines dating from the 14th-17th centuries. Helminths and protozoa were detected using microscopy and enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). We identified Ascaris sp., Capillaria sp., Dicrocoelium dendriticum, Entamoeba histolytica, Fasciola hepatica, Giardia duodenalis, Taenia sp. and Trichuris sp. in Medieval samples, and continuing presence of Ascaris sp., D. dendriticum, F. hepatica, G. duodenalis and Trichuris sp. into the Renaissance. While some variation existed between households, there was a broadly consistent pattern with the domination of species spread by fecal contamination of food and drink (whipworm, roundworm and protozoa that cause dysentery). These data allow us to explore diet and hygiene, together with routes for the spread of fecal-oral parasites. Key factors explaining our findings are manuring practices with human excrement in market gardens, and flooding of the polluted River Senne during the 14th-17th centuries.

Though resulting from a long-term process, the need to manage pregnancies both medically and bureaucratically became a state concern, especially from the 1920s onwards. A woman's official obligation to notify the state of her pregnancy (and therefore to know it on time) goes beyond a matter of biopolicies and poses a range of contradictions. 'Pregnant or not?' - as an issue of knowledge - is a powerful tool for apprehending the tensions between individual freedom, privacy, institutional requirements and professional powers.In order to better understand the historical meaning of pregnancy diagnostics in mid-twentieth-century France, this paper combines three dimensions: uncertainty and its management; the informational asymmetry between institutional agents and women; and the diachronic dimension of gestation. Writing this history sheds more light on an apparent paradox: while knowing and notifying one's own pregnancy became a duty, the tools that could help women eliminate some doubt right from the first months of their pregnancy - in particular the innovation of laboratory diagnosis - was seen as a danger. When, in 1938, private laboratories began publishing advertisements for the laboratory test in the most widely-read newspapers, tending to reframe it as a commercial service, the anti-abortion crusade was increasing its propaganda and its political pressure. This crusade's legal victory proved incomplete, but for a long time some of the most conservative physicians recommended great parsimony in prescribing testing. Combined with reducing the legal time limit for notification, this conflict shows how the state injunctions towards women could look like a 'double bind'.

The aim of the present study was to examine the parasite fauna present in mountain viscacha Lagidium viscacia (Caviomorpha, Chinchillidae) fecal pellets collected from 'Cueva Peligro', a cave located in Chubut province, Patagonia, Argentina, throughout the last 1200 years. A total of 84 samples were examined for parasites. Each pellet was whole processed: rehydrated, homogenized, sediment and examined using light microscopy. The samples and eggs of parasites present were described, measured and photographed. Thirty-eight samples tested positive for the nematodes Heteroxynema (Cavioxyura) viscaciae Sutton & Hugot, 1989, Helminthoxys effilatus Schuurmans-Stekhoven, 1951 (Oxyurida: Oxyuridae), Trichuris sp. Roederer, 1761 (Trichinellida: Trichuridae) and one anoplocephalid species (Cestoda: Anoplocephalidae). This is the first time that H. effilatus is reported from ancient times. Significant differences of parasite occurrences through this temporal period were recorded. Parasitic life cycles and their presence along the studied period are so discussed.

Objectives: Suicide is a complex phenomenon determined by the interplay of an articulated network of factors including socio-economic factors which have a decisive role. This paper investigates the development of the modern conceptualization of suicide in Europe, its sociological understandings and its intertwinement with economic cycles throughout time., Methods: MEDLINE, SCHOLAR, EMBASE using the keywords 'socioeconomic factors AND suicide'; 'economic cycles AND suicide'; 'history AND suicide' without timeframe limitations. Moreover, journal-by-journal search in journals of related areas was performed., Results: In total, 51 historical studies focusing on the subjects in European countries were included. Three main areas arose: (a) development of the conceptualization of suicide over time; (b) sociological understandings of suicide according to the structure of society and its economy of power; (c) economic theories explaining the intertwinement of economic cycles and suicides., Conclusions: Suicide is a deeply human phenomenon inescapably linked to and grounded in society and economic cycles. Understandings from the past show the importance of accurate analysis of socio-economic contexts that shape societies together with man's own sense of self in order to organize multi-layered tangible and intangible support strategies to better understand and prevent suicide in this day and age.

Despite its prominent position in today's medical research, popular culture and everyday life, cancer's history is relatively unwritten. Compared to the other great 'plagues' - cholera, tuberculosis or tropical fevers, to name but a scant handful - cancer has few dedicated pages in the general surveys, and its specialists have largely failed to convince the broader community of medical historians - or indeed historians of anything at all - that histories of the disease can tell us fundamental things about the science and practice of medicine, both past and present. Moreover, cancer has a remarkably stable profile over time, at least in terms of its definition, language and terminology - a detail that only makes the disease's absence from historical literature more surprising.

Neuropsychiatry has had different meanings at different times in the history of clinical neuroscience. In this article, the origins of what has become today's neuropsychiatry are briefly explored, hopefully revealing a number of pioneers of the discipline, some of the names being familiar to many readers, others however being less recognized or even unknown to those who today would wish to carry the moniker of a neuropsychiatrist. It explores the rise of what I refer to as modern or today's neuropsychiatry, and empathizes a phenomenological approach to clinical understanding, and the fact that neuropsychiatry it is a discipline in its own right and not just a wing of psychiatry or a bridge between neurology and psychiatry.

The present article seeks to fill a number of lacunae with regard to the study of the circulation and assimilation of different bodies of medical knowledge in an important cultural contact zone, that is the Upper Guinea Coast. Building upon ongoing research on trade and cultural brokerage in the area, it focuses upon shifting attitudes and practices with regard to health and healing as a result of cultural interaction and hybridisation against the background of growing intra-African and Afro-Atlantic interaction from the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century. Largely based upon travel accounts, missionary reports and documents produced by the Portuguese Inquisition, it shows how forms of medical knowledge shifted and circulated between littoral areas and their hinterland, as well as between the coast, the Atlantic and beyond. It shows that the changing patterns of trade, migration and settlement associated with Mandé influence and Afro-Atlantic exchange had a decisive impact on changing notions of illness and therapeutic trajectories. Over the centuries, cross-cultural, reciprocal borrowing contributed to the development of healing kits employed by Africans and non-African outsiders alike, which were used and brokered by local communities in different locations in the region.

This article examines a fifteenth-century remedy book, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson c. 299, and describes its collection of 314 medieval medical prescriptions. The recipes are organised broadly from head to toe, and often several remedies are offered for the same complaint. Some individual recipes are transcribed with modern English translations. The few non-recipe texts are also noted. The difference between a remedy book and a leechbook is explained, and this manuscript is situated in relation to other known examples of late medieval medical anthologies. The particular feature that distinguishes Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson c. 299 from other similar volumes is the evidence that it continued to be used during the sixteenth century. This usage was of two kinds. Firstly, the London lawyer who owned it not only inscribed his name but annotated the original recipe collection in various ways, providing finding-aids that made it much more user-friendly. Secondly, he, and other members of his family, added another forty-three recipes to the original collection (some examples of these are also transcribed). These two layers of engagement with the manuscript are interrogated in detail in order to reveal what ailments may have troubled this family most, and to judge how much faith they placed in the old remedies contained in this old book. It is argued that the knowledge preserved in medieval books enjoyed a longevity that extended beyond the period of the manuscript book, and that manuscripts were read and valued long after the advent of printing.

This paper explores the assimilation of the flightless dodo into early modern natural history. The dodo was first described by Dutch sailors landing on Mauritius in 1598, and became extinct in the 1680s or 1690s. Despite this brief period of encounter, the bird was a popular subject in natural-history works and a range of other genres. The dodo will be used here as a counterexample to the historical narratives of taxonomic crisis and abrupt shifts in natural history caused by exotic creatures coming to Europe. Though this bird had a bizarre form, early modern naturalists integrated the dodo and other flightless birds through several levels of conceptual categorization, including the geographical, morphological and symbolic. Naturalists such as Charles L'Ecluse produced a set of typical descriptive tropes that helped make up the European dodo. These long-lived images were used for a variety of symbolic purposes, demonstrated by the depiction of the Dutch East India enterprise in Willem Piso's 1658 publication. The case of the dodo shows that, far from there being a dramatic shift away from emblematics in the seventeenth century, the implicit symbolic roles attributed to exotic beasts by naturalists constructing them from scant information and specimens remained integral to natural history.

In his personal notebooks, the little known Bohemian physician Georg Handsch (1529-c. 1578) recorded, among other things, hundreds of vernacular phrases and expressions he and other physicians used in their oral interaction with patients and families. Based primarily on this extraordinary source, this paper traces the terms, concepts and images to which sixteenth-century physicians resorted when they explained the nature of a patient's disease and justified their treatment. At the bedside and in the consultation room, Handsch and his fellow physicians attributed most diseases to a local accumulation of impure, putrid or otherwise pathological humours. The latter were commonly said to result, in turn, from an insufficient concoction and assimilation of food and drink in the stomach and the liver or from an obstruction of the humoral flow inside the body and across its borders. By contrast, other notions and explanatory models, which had a prominent place in contemporary learned medical writing, hardly played a role at all in the physicians' oral communication. Specific disease terms were rarely used, a mere imbalance of the four natural humours in the body was almost never inculpated, and the patient's personal life-style and other non-naturals did not attract much attention either. These striking differences between the ways in which physicians explained the patients' diseases in their daily practice and the explanatory models we find in contemporary textbooks, are attributed, above all, to the physicians' precarious situation in the early modern medical marketplace. Since dissatisfied patients were quick to turn to another healer, physicians had to explain the disease and justify their treatment in a manner that was comprehensible to ordinary lay people and in line with their expectations and beliefs, which, at the time, revolved almost entirely around notions of impurity and evacuation.

Through the biographies of a dynasty of practitioners who were active in some of the mountainous villages of the Venetian Terraferma the article brings to light unknown aspects of the professional world of surgeons. Their activities were profoundly influenced by the economic and geographic peculiarities of the territory where they lived and worked. Provincial towns and their territories offered professional opportunities both to licensed and to non-university trained practitioners. However, it was generally in small villages, especially those situated in border areas and part of the main commercial networks, that surgeons preferred to establish their practices, thus supplementing the medical services supplied by the town. Normally their knowledge was largely empirical and was transmitted from father to son. The apprenticeship-based training does not appear alternative to the academic education typical of learned practitioners: much evidence points to the existence of 'scientific autodidacts', self-taught practitioners who possessed and read medical texts or had attended academic courses, even if only in part. Practising surgery in this area was a highly mobile activity, stretching from the village to the neighbouring valleys, and even to areas outside the boundaries of the city and across the border of the Venetian state. Surgeons, furthermore, were able to transfer their skills and knowledge across a range of different occupations such as shoemakers, leather workers and tailors, a fact that confirms their close ties with the local artisan milieu.

Despite his demanding religious responsibilities, Paolo Sarpi maintained an active involvement in science between 1578 and 1598- as his Pensieri reveal. They show that from 1585 onwards he studied the Copernican theory and recorded arguments in its favour. The fact that for 1595 they include an outline of a Copernican tidal theory resembling Galileo's Dialogue theory is well known. But examined closely, Sarpi's theory is found to be different from that of the Dialogue in several important respects. That Sarpi was a Copernican by 1592 is revealed by other of his pensieri, whereas at that time we know that Galileo was not. The examination of Sarpi's tidal theory and of the work of Galileo in this period indicates that the theory Sarpi recorded in 1595 was of his own creation. The appreciation that the theory was Sarpi's and that Galileo subsequently came to change his views on the Copernican theory and adopted the tidal theory has major implications for our understanding of the significance of Sarpi's contribution to the Scientific Revolution. Moreover, it appears that several of the most significant theoretical features of the tidal theory published by Galileo in the Dialogue - and which proved of lasting value - were in reality Sarpi's.

This article examines the conception of elements in the natural philosophy of Nicolaus Taurellus (1547-1606) and explores the theological motivation that stands behind this conception. By some of his early modern readers, Taurellus may have been understood as a proponent of material atoms. By contrast, I argue that considerations concerning the substantiality of the ultimate constituents of composites led Taurellus to an immaterialist ontology, according to which elements are immaterial forms that possess active and passive potencies as well as motion and extension. In Taurellus's view, immaterialism about elements provides support for the theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo. As he argues, the ontology of immaterial forms helps to explicate a sense in which creatures are substances, not accidents of the divine substance. In particular, he maintains that immaterial forms stand in suitable relations of ontological dependence to God: creation dependence (since forms would not exist without the divine act of creation), but neither subsistence dependence (since forms continue to exist without continued divine agency) nor activity dependence (since forms are active without requiring divine concurrence).

Objective: To discover the anatomist who first identified the upper oesophageal sphincter., Method: The authors searched dozens of antique anatomy textbooks kept in the old section of the 'Vincenzo Pinali' Medical Library of Padua University, looking for descriptions of the upper oesophageal sphincter., Results: The oesophageal sphincter was drawn correctly only in 1601, by Julius Casserius, in the book De vocis auditusque organis historia anatomica… (which translates as 'An Anatomical History on the Organs of Voice and Hearing …'), and was properly described by Antonio Maria Valsalva in 1704 in the book De aure humana tractatus… ('Treatise on the Human Ear …')., Conclusion: Anatomists Casserius and Valsalva can be considered the discoverers of the 'oesophageal sphincter'.

This article discusses a Latin manuscript that can be found in the Jan Baptist Van Helmont (1579-1644) archives in Mechelen (Malines), Belgium. The manuscript bears no author and no title, and begins with the words 'Exterior homo', hence being referred by this provisional title in the analysis. Ecclesiastical prosecutors investigating Van Helmont for heresy in 1634 considered that it was written by him, but this was vehemently denied by the Flemish physician. The present article takes a first detailed look at the content of the treatise and ideas contained therein. It hence identifies the manuscript as belonging to a seventeenth-century physician influenced by the ideas of Theophrastus Paracelsus (1493-1541) and his interpreter Petrus Severinus (1542-1602), and containing a complex medical philosophy drawn on alchemical thought. Thus, the anonymous author presents a comprehensive view on the nature and structure of man, as well as an idiosyncratic theory of human generation. Following the analysis of the treatise, the article further compares it with the known works of J.B. Van Helmont, and finds that it is very similar to his ideas. Hence, the article concludes that it is 'likely' that the manuscript is indeed written by Van Helmont, although lack of direct evidence prevents certain attribution.

In this paper I argue that William Harvey believed in a form of astrology. It has long been known that Harvey employed a macrocosm-microcosm analogy and used alchemical terminology in describing how the two types of blood change into one another. This paper then seeks to examine a further aspect of Harvey in relation to the magical tradition. There is an important corollary to this line of thought, however. This is that while Harvey does have a belief in astrology, it is strongly related to Aristotle's views in this area and is quite restricted and attenuated relative to some contemporary beliefs in astrology. This suggests a more general thesis. While Harvey was amenable to ideas which we associate with the natural magic tradition, those ideas had a very broad range of formulation and there was a limit to how far he would accept them. This limit was largely determined by Harvey's adherence to Aristotle's natural philosophy and his Christian beliefs. I argue that this is also the case in relation to Harvey's use of the macrocosm-microcosm analogy and of alchemical terminology, and, as far as we can rely on the evidence, this informs his attitudes towards witches as well. Understanding Harvey's influences and motives here is important in placing him properly in the context of early seventeenth-century thought.

This article examines the reception of the early modern hospital among the indigenous people of the Andes under Spanish colonial rule. During the period covered by this study (sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries), the hospital was conceived primarily as a manifestation of the sovereign’s paternalistic concern for his subjects’ spiritual well being. Hospitals in the Spanish American colonies were organised along racial lines, and those catering to Indians were meant to complement the missionary endeavour. Besides establishing hospitals in the main urban centres, Spanish colonial legislation instituted hospitals for Indians in provincial towns and in small rural jurisdictions throughout the Peruvian viceroyalty. Indian hospitals often met with the suspicion and even hostility of their supposed beneficiaries, especially indigenous rulers. By conceptualising the Indian hospital as a tool of colonial government, this article investigates the reasons behind its negative reception, the work of adaptation that allowed a few of them to thrive, and the eventual failure of most of these institutions.

The De humani corporis fabrica [The Fabric of the Human Body], Basle, 1543, of Andreas Vesalius is deservedly famous as the first modern book of anatomy. A second edition was published in Basle in 1555, but little is known of Vesalius' activities after that date. This article discusses a recent find: Vesalius' own copy of the 1555 edition, heavily annotated in preparation for a never published third edition. Vesalius made hundreds of changes to the second edition, the great majority being stylistic, altering the Latin words but not the overall meaning. There are also changes to the plates to give greater clarity or to correct mistakes by the original block-cutter. There is little new anatomical material, although Vesalius continued to meditate about what he had earlier discovered. He shows no sign of being acquainted with the findings of others, like Colombo or Falloppia, that were published after he had moved his residence from Brussels to Spain in summer 1559, perhaps leaving this volume behind. The number of annotations shows Vesalius' passionate concern not only for accuracy but also for the most effective way of proclaiming his new anatomical message.

Freud's analogies were legion: hydraulic pipes, military recruitment, magic writing pads. These and some three hundred others took features of the mind and bound them to far-off scenes--the id only very partially resembles an uncontrollable horse, as Freud took pains to note. But there was one relation between psychic and public act that Freud did not delimit in this way: censorship, the process that checked memories and dreams on their way to the conscious. (Freud dubbed the relation between internal and external censorship a 'parallel' rather than a limited analogy.) At first, Freud likened this suppression to the blacking out of texts at the Russian frontier. During the First World War, he suffered, and spoke of suffering under, Viennese postal and newspaper censorship--Freud was forced to leave his envelopes unsealed, and to recode or delete content. Over and over, he registered the power of both internal and public censorship in shared form: distortion, anticipatory deletion, softenings, even revision to hide suppression. Political censorship left its mark as the conflict reshaped his view of the psyche into a society on a war footing, with homunculus-like border guards sifting messages as they made their way--or did not--across a topography of mind.

A new political practice, the 'reason of state', informed the ends and practices of natural study in the late sixteenth century. Informed by the study of the Roman historian Tacitus, political writers gathered 'secrets of empire' from both history and travel. Following the economic reorientation of 'reason of state' by Giovanni Botero (1544-1617), such secrets came to include bodies of useful particulars concerning nature and art collected by an expanding personnel of intelligencers. A comparison between various writers describing wide-scale collections, such as Botero, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Jakob Bornitz (1560-1625) and Matthias Bernegger (1582-1640), reveals that seventeenth-century natural intelligencers across Europe not only were analogous to political intelligencers, but also were sometimes one and the same. Those seeking political prudence cast themselves as miners, prying precious particulars from the recesses of history, experience and disparate disciplines, including mathematics, alchemy and natural philosophy. The seventeenth-century practice of combining searches for secrets of empire, nature and art contests a frequent historiographical divide between empirical science and Tacitism or reason of state. It also points to the ways political cunning shaped the management of information for both politics and the study of nature and art.

Traditional historiography of science has constructed secrecy in opposition to openness. In the first part of the paper, I will challenge this opposition. Openness and secrecy are often interlocked, impossible to take apart, and they might even reinforce each other. They should be understood as positive (instead of privative) categories that do not necessarily stand in opposition to each other. In the second part of this paper, I call for a historicization of the concepts of 'openness' and 'secrecy'. Focusing on the early modern period, I briefly introduce three kinds of secrecy that are difficult to analyse with a simple oppositional understanding of openness and secrecy. In particular, I focus on secrecy in relation to esoteric traditions, theatricality and allegory.

Andreas Vesalius' (1514-64) first publication was a Paraphrasis of the ninth book of the Liber ad Almansorem, written by the Arab-Persian physician and alchemist Rhazes (854-925). The role of Rhazes in Vesalius' oeuvre has thus far been much disregarded. The different ways Rhazes recurs reveal an intellectual evolution in Vesalius' work. In the Paraphrasis, Vesalius subjects Rhazes to the authority of Galen in the context of the early sixteenth-century humanist campaign for the substitution of Arab influences by Greek 'originals'. Over the years Vesalius continues his work on Rhazes, but his approach becomes more internationalistic. Ultimately, Vesalius criticises Galen while expressing sympathy for the Arab author. This may be the more significant as Rhazes could have influenced Vesalius in the act of criticising Galen - critical discussions of Galen were available to Vesalius in Latin translations of Rhazes's Liber Continens. Although Vesalius never refers to the work, it is hardly possible he was unaware of it: similarities in structure, rhetoric and form between the Continens and the De humani corporis fabrica could support this hypothesis.

Rabies is considered one of the oldest infectious diseases known to humans. However, the first written reports on rabies cases in the Americas did not appear until the first decade of the 18th century from Mexico. In an attempt to clarify if the disease was already present in pre-Columbian times, we searched for evidence in the Maya and Aztec cultures. Other sources of information were early manuscripts written by the conquistadors and early explorers. We did not identify any unequivocal direct evidence that the disease rabies was known in pre-Columbian Central America but sufficient circumstantial evidence is available suggesting that (bat) rabies was already present in these early times.

Sick children were ubiquitous in early modern England, and yet they have received very little attention from historians. Taking the elusive perspective of the child, this article explores the physical, emotional, and spiritual experience of illness in England between approximately 1580 and 1720. What was it like being ill and suffering pain? How did the young respond emotionally to the anticipation of death? It is argued that children's experiences were characterised by profound ambivalence: illness could be terrifying and distressing, but also a source of emotional and spiritual fulfillment and joy. This interpretation challenges the common assumption amongst medical historians that the experiences of early modern patients were utterly miserable. It also sheds light on children's emotional feelings for their parents, a subject often overlooked in the historiography of childhood. The primary sources used in this article include diaries, autobiographies, letters, the biographies of pious children, printed possession cases, doctors' casebooks, and theological treatises concerning the afterlife.

This article focuses on women's luxury footwear to examine issues of economic, material, and familial life in Renaissance Italy. It uses graphic work by Albrecht Dürer to explore footwear design, and draw from disparate sources to propose a new method for evaluating its cost. The article argues that sumptuous footwear was available for a range of prices that are not reflected in surviving payment records, and that it was largely less expensive than moralists and legislators implied. In conclusion, it employs Minerbetti documentation to consider the role particular shoes may have played in developing personal subjectivity.

This article analyzes the fifteenth-century attempt by the Dominican order, especially in Cologne, to win canonization for the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Albert the Great. It shows how Albert's thought on natural philosophy and magic was understood and variously applied, how the Dominicans at Cologne composed his vitae, and how the order's Observant movement participated in these developments. It situates the canonization attempt at the intersection of two significant trends in which the order was a leading participant: first, the late medieval efforts to reform Christian society beginning with the religious life of monks and mendicants; second, the increasing concerns about the practice of learned and demonic mafic that laid groundwork for the witch-hunting of the early modern period. This article aims to shed light on intersections of science and religion -- their apprehension and negotiation -- at a decisive moment in European history for both fields of human endeavor.

This essay examines portraits of old women that were produced for the households of the professional and elite classes in Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, and the Veneto during the second half of the sixteenth century, when, as a result of religious and social reform, women's lives came under increasing scrutiny. By interpreting the portraits within the context of prescriptive texts on the stages of women's lives, this study argues that the portraits provide evidence for the pivotal role of old women within the moral and symbolic order of the family, as well as in the wider community beyond the home.

This essay, which seeks to provide an historical framework for our efforts to develop a scientific psychiatric nosology, begins by reviewing the classificatory approaches that arose in the early history of biological taxonomy. Initial attempts at species definition used top-down approaches advocated by experts and based on a few essential features of the organism chosen a priori. This approach was subsequently rejected on both conceptual and practical grounds and replaced by bottom-up approaches making use of a much wider array of features. Multiple parallels exist between the beginnings of biological taxonomy and psychiatric nosology. Like biological taxonomy, psychiatric nosology largely began with 'expert' classifications, typically influenced by a few essential features, articulated by one or more great 19th-century diagnosticians. Like biology, psychiatry is struggling toward more soundly based bottom-up approaches using diverse illness characteristics. The underemphasized historically contingent nature of our current psychiatric classification is illustrated by recounting the history of how 'Schneiderian' symptoms of schizophrenia entered into DSM-III. Given these historical contingencies, it is vital that our psychiatric nosologic enterprise be cumulative. This can be best achieved through a process of epistemic iteration. If we can develop a stable consensus in our theoretical orientation toward psychiatric illness, we can apply this approach, which has one crucial virtue. Regardless of the starting point, if each iteration (or revision) improves the performance of the nosology, the eventual success of the nosologic process, to optimally reflect the complex reality of psychiatric illness, is assured.

For much of their childhood and adult life, the twelve surviving children of William the Silent were separated linguistically and geographically. Many of the children forged important relationships with male primary carers who were not their biological parents. This paper explores the children's correspondence with their biological father William and with paternal figures to understand competing forms of familial authority among William's children. This paper places particular interest on analysis of the gendered negotiation of paternal bonds in the letters of William's sons and daughters, as they established multiple relationships with father figures during their childhood.

A catalogue of dates and places of major outbreaks of epidemic diseases, that occurred in the Chinese Empire between 243 B.C.E. and 1911 C.E., combined with corresponding demographic data, provides a unique opportunity to explore how the pressure of epidemics grew in an agrarian society over 2000 years. This quantitative analysis reveals that: (1) the frequency of outbreaks increased slowly before the 12th century and rapidly thereafter, until 1872; (2) in the first millennium of our era, the people of China lived for decades free of major epidemics; in the second millennium, major outbreaks occurred every couple of years, but were localized; (3) in the more recent centuries, these outbreaks were as common, but disseminated to more places. This evolution, closely matching the demographic growth, was similar in the north and south of China, and therefore may have been similar in other regions of the world.

Kepler's treatise on optics of 1604 furnished, along with technical solutions to problems in medieval perspective, a mathematically-based visual language for the observation of nature. This language, based on Kepler's theory of retinal pictures, ascribed a new role to geometrical diagrams. This paper examines Kepler's pictorial language against the backdrop of alchemical emblems that flourished in and around the court of Rudolf II in Prague. It highlights the cultural context in which Kepler's optics was immersed, and the way in which Kepler attempted to demarcate his new science from other modes of the investigation of nature.

The rich archival records of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Venice have yielded much information about early modern society and culture. The transcripts of witchcraft trials held before the Inquisition reveal the complexities of early modern conceptions of natural and supernatural. The tribunal found itself entirely unable to convict individuals charged with performing harmful magic, or maleficio, as different worldviews clashed in the courtroom. Physicians, exorcists, and inquisitors all had different approaches to distinguishing natural phenomena from supernatural, and without a consensus guilty verdicts could not be obtained.

A commonplace of modern feminist scholarship holds that fifteenth-century Italian humanists regarded the figure of the articulate women with hostility and suspicion. This position is insufficiently nuanced: while it may have been true to some extent in republican contexts, it was emphatically not the case in the secular princely courts, where women's capacity for eloquence was frequently a subject of praise. Humanistic attitudes toward female eloquence are examined here with special reference to Ercole de' Roberti's representation of the classical heroine Portia in oratorical guise in his Portia and Brutus, painted at the court of Ferrara in the late 1480s or early '90s. The article contextualizes Roberti's painting with regard to its classical literary sources, to contemporary practices of female oratory, and to the cultural and social self-positioning of the work's probable patron, Duchess Eleonora d'Aragona.