Title page with Cliff family ownership notes. Nicholas Culpeper, Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (London, 1654). Wellcome Library EPB 19298/B. Image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London.

Reading for Cures investigates medical print production and medical reading in early modern England. On the book production side, it adds to the current literature by focusing on two crucial areas: medical translations and household medical guides. As translations of Continental medical texts constituted the bulk of sixteenth and seventeenth-century English medical print, I seek to contextualize this important knowledge-making and transmission process within wider social, cultural and economic histories of the period. I also focus on the emerging genre of household medical guides and locate it within narratives on the rise of domestic literature, studies of women’s work and accounts of home-based medicine. On the book consumption side, I analyze marginal annotations in printed books and manuscript books of reading notes. My findings so far lead me to argue that explorations of early modern reading practices can offer historians insight into household medical activities and processes of knowledge codification. Examination of traces of reading reveals contemporary attitudes towards medical and scientific knowledge and uncovers the multi-step process used by home-based practitioners to assess and assimilate new ideas into their activities.

Focusing on sixteenth and seventeenth-century England, my project will result in the first monograph examining both early modern medical book production and consumption. It will investigate the impact of vernacular print on the circulation of medical knowledge during a period when the English book trade and healthcare services were undergoing rapid changes. Through examining how early modern men and women were reading and writing medicine, it seeks to understand the flexible and constantly renegotiable relationships between authors and readers and health-care providers and consumers. It will situate medical print within two major historical narratives: the gradual shift from manuscript to print and the increase in medical consumerism and commercialization of medicine. This case study will not only add a new dimension to both these debated areas but also a new approach to the study of circulation and transmission of vernacular medical knowledge in early modern Britain.