Elaine Leong

MPG Minerva Research Group Leader

D. Phil.

Residence: September 1, 2012–August 31, 2017

Profile

My research investigates medical and scientific knowledge transfer and production in early modern England. I am currently working on two book projects. The first, Treasuries for Health: Medical Knowledge and Practice in the Early Modern Household traces home-based medical and scientific activities in seventeenth-century England through in-depth studies of manuscript and printed medical recipe collections. The second, Reading and Writing Medicine in Early Modern England explores medical print production and medical reading in early modern England. The project focuses on assessing what types of vernacular medical texts were available to early modern readers and on how readers engaged with and appropriated medical information. I am also interested in investigating women’s medical knowledge and practice and how this knowledge was generated, acquired and transmitted. Finally, I have particular interests in note-taking, paper technologies and household archives of natural knowledge.  With Alisha Rankin (Tufts University), I edited Secrets and Knowledge: Medicine, Science and Commerce 1500-1800 (Ashgate Publishing, 2011).

I gained my doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 2006. Before joining the MPIWG, I was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. In 2006 and 2007, I held short-term fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. My article ‘Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household’, (82, 2008) was awarded the 2009 J. Worth Estes Prize by the American Association for the History of Medicine and the 2010 Jerry Stannard Award.