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ISSN 1749-8155

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Review Date: 
23 May 2022

This interdisciplinary collection of essays, emerging from a conference held at Oxford University and edited by scholars with interests in literature and medicine in early modern England, seeks to establish how the inhabitants of late medieval and early modern Western Europe defined blood, and to uncover how references to blood were deployed in descriptions of the human condition across various

Review Date: 
5 Mar 2021

Centring on the period from the 11th to the early 16th centuries, this collection of eleven essays and a foreword by both well-established and younger scholars addresses a range of still-unexplored aspects of medieval women’s involvement in medical treatment and health care, as well as their role in the consumption, transmission, and production of medical knowledge.

Review Date: 
25 Sep 2020

Students of history are not always aware when they live through major historiographic change; shifts are sometimes only recognizable in hindsight, with accumulated divergences sharply evident against the backdrop of the field.

Review Date: 
4 Sep 2020

In 1974, David Hey published his book on Myddle in Shropshire, a study based upon his doctoral research at Leicester University. One might wonder how a proud South Yorkshireman had even heard of an insignificant North Shropshire parish, let alone decided to carry out research on it. Fortunately, his supervisor, Professor W. G.

Review Date: 
18 May 2017

Good reference books on the history of alcohol remain few and far between, despite increased interest in the area in the last 20 years.

Review Date: 
16 Jun 2016

With The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine and Sin, Stephen Brogan offers a new understanding of the royal touch – the ability of kings and queens to miraculously heal their subjects of particular diseases in 16th and especially 17th-century England.

Review Date: 
11 Dec 2014

As Ferngren explains in the opening pages: ‘My purpose in this volume is to provide a concise but comprehensive survey that traces the history of the intersection of medicine and healing with religious traditions in the Western world from the earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt to our own era’; a sizeable task to say the least.

Review Date: 
21 Jun 2012

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine appears at a critical moment for medical history; in a period when its practitioners are being forced to re-evaluate their aims and agendas in the face of shifting funding priorities and disciplinary angst. Just a few years, one leading medical historian publicly declared that medical history was ‘dead’, or was at least heading that way.

Review Date: 
1 Sep 2010

The concept of contagion is entangled with so many themes in the history of medicine that any on-line collection on the subject can hardly fail to generate interest among the scholarly community. Harvard University’s Contagion: Historical Views of Disease and Epidemics does not disappoint.

Review Date: 
1 Dec 2008

Sandra Cavallo’s Artisans of the Body in Early Modern Italy will appeal to scholars interested in the social history of medicine for more than one reason.

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