Teaching a Perfect Knowledge in the Arts and Sciences: Robert Dossie’s...
By Marieke Hendriksen Robert Dossie (1717-1777) was and English apothecary, experimental chemist, and writer. Within just three years, he published three very successful handbooks: The elaboratory laid...
View Article“Bonny-Clabber Physicians”: Eating Clean in the Seventeenth Century
Michael Walkden The concept of ‘clean eating’ is nothing new, but ideas about what constitutes ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ food have varied within and across cultures. In the later seventeenth century, the...
View ArticleHow Best to Treat the Heat in 1793 Beijing
By Marta Hanson Translating traditional Chinese medical terms into modern English forces one to consider dramatic changes in medicine over the past two centuries. Take, for example, the modern Chinese...
View ArticlePigeon slippers
By Robert Ralley and Lauren Kassell The Casebooks Project, a team of scholars at the University of Cambridge, has spent a decade studying 80,000 consultations recorded by the seventeenth-century...
View ArticleOvid’s Toothpaste: Literary Allusion in One Medieval Cosmetic Recipe
By Chelsea Rae Silva Women, declares the sixteenth-century physician Donatus Antonius de Altomare, “think nothing more unseemly… then when they laugh, to show their foule rusty & spotted teeth.” In...
View ArticleCanine Cures or Our Best Friend…
By Marc Bruck To paraphrase the old adage: dogs are humanity’s best friend. Loving, loyal and protective, they are often considered members of the family. They are symbols of wealth and power, love and...
View ArticleChinese American Herbal Medicine: A History of Importation and Improvisation
By Tamara Venit Shelton “Chinese herbalists imported everything from China.” This is what I consistently heard from herbalists I interviewed when writing Herbs and Roots: A History of Chinese Doctors...
View ArticleA Spider at the Pulse
By Yijie Huang I received a gift from my supervisor this spring, a vial of “POSITIVITY Pulse Point Oil” from ESPA. As a historian of pulse diagnosis in early modern medicine, I am fascinated by it–not...
View Article“Very good are the words of the wise”: Plagues and Remedies of the Colonial Maya
By R.A. Kashanipour Early Spanish settlers, administrators, and chroniclers frequently lamented how Old World diseases ravaged native communities in the New World. The famed Dominican Bartolomé de Las...
View ArticleA Tale of Chiles, a Servant, and a Travelling Medical Scholar in Early Modern...
By Brian Dott Fascinated by early modern Chinese cultural history, I research popular religion, especially pilgrimage, and the culinary and medical uses of chile peppers. Eating Sichuan food, I...
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