Murky waters

Murky waters

Author: Sophie Vasset

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 1526159708

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Murky waters challenges the refined image of spa towns in eighteenth-century Britain by unveiling darker and more ambivalent contemporary representations. It reasserts the centrality of health in British spas by looking at disease, the representation of treatment and the social networks of care woven into spa towns. The book explores the great variety of medical and literary discourses on the numerous British spas in the long eighteenth century and offers a rare look at spas beyond Bath. Following the thread of 'murkiness', it explores the underwater culture of spas, from the gender fluidity of users to the local and national political dimensions, as well as the financial risks taken by gamblers and investors. It thus brings a fresh look at mineral waters and a pinch of salt to health-related discourses.


Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England

Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England

Author: Joanna Picciotto

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010-06-15

Total Pages: 888

ISBN-13: 9780674049062

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Joanna Picciotto's Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England is a splendid study of the origins, devlopment, and eventual decline of the Experimentalist tradition in seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century English letters. In tracing out the arc of this intellectual and professional trajectory, Picciotto engages productively with the crucial religious, socio-economic, philosophical, and literary movements associated with the ongoing labors of the `innocent eye'".---Eileen Reeves, Princetion University --


Sweet and Clean?

Sweet and Clean?

Author: Susan North

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-03-26

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0192598201

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sweet and Clean? challenges the widely held beliefs on bathing and cleanliness in the past. For over thirty years, the work of the French historian, George Vigarello, has been hugely influential on early modern European social history, describing an aversion to water and bathing, and the use of linen underwear as the sole cleaning agent for the body. However, these concepts do not apply to early modern England. Sweet and Clean? analyses etiquette and medical literature, revealing repeated recommendations to wash or bathe in order to clean the skin. Clean linen was essential for propriety but advice from medical experts was contradictory. Many doctors were convinced that it prevented the spread of contagious diseases, but others recommended flannel for undergarments, and a few thought changing a fever patient's linens was dangerous. The methodology of material culture helps determine if and how this advice was practiced. Evidence from inventories, household accounts and manuals, and surviving linen garments tracks underwear through its life-cycle of production, making, wearing, laundering, and final recycling. Although the material culture of washing bodies is much sparser, other sources, such as the Old Bailey records, paint a more accurate picture of cleanliness in early modern England than has been previously described. The contrasting analyses of linen and bodies reveal what histories material culture best serves. Finally, what of the diseases-plague, smallpox, and typhus-that cleanliness of body and clothes were thought to prevent? Did following early modern medical advice protect people from these illnesses?


Swimming with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale

Swimming with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale

Author: Julia Allen

Publisher: Lutterworth Press

Published: 2012-11-29

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0718840992

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'Swimming with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale' challenges the popular image of Samuel Johnson as a man who favoured energetic discussion over physical exercise, enthroned in an armchair peering short-sightedly at a book. Thanks to the diarist and author Hester Thrale we have many anecdotes that connect Dr Johnson to a variety of sports, and Julia Allen, following Lytton Strachey's advice to attack her subject in unexpected places, uses entries from Dr Johnson's dictionary and anecdotes about the great man as her window into the world of eighteenth-century sport and exercise. Revealing a world both foreign and familiar, Allen takes the reader through a range of sports and activities, from boxing and cricket to dancing and coach travel to swimming, riding and skating. She reasserts women's place in eighteenth century sport, especially the luckier ones such as Mrs Thrale, and draws on medical treatises and reports to show how dangerous these sports could be, and to explore the theories upon which contemporary notions about health and exercise were based. Combined with fascinating biographies not only of Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale, but also of a host of eighteenth-century sporting celebrities, Swimming with Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale gives a fascinating insight into a century where things were done very differently, often with dangerous consequences. This eccentric book brings together pieces of eighteenth-century life to create a vivid picture of the whole, making it essential reading for anybody interested in history or sport.


Literature and Medicine: Volume 1

Literature and Medicine: Volume 1

Author: Clark Lawlor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1108368980

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Offering an authoritative and timely account of the relationship between literature and medicine in the eighteenth century and Romantic period, a time when most diseases had no cure, this collection provides a valuable overview of how two dynamic fields influenced and shaped one another. Covering a period in which both medicine and literature underwent frequent and sometimes radical change, the volume examines the complex mutual construction of these two fields via various perspectives: disability, gender, race, rank, sexuality, the global and colonial, politics, ethics, and the visual. Diseases, fashionable and otherwise, such as Defoe's representation of the plague, feature strongly, as authors argue for the role literary genres play in affecting people's experience of physical and mental illness (and health) across the volume. Along with its sister publication, Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, this volume offers a major critical overview of the study of literature and medicine.


Literature and Medicine

Literature and Medicine

Author: Clark Lawlor

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1108420869

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Offers an authoritative account of literature and medicine at a vital point in their emergence during the eighteenth century.