Abstract
This chapter uses new approaches to seventeenth-century paratexts to analyse medical texts addressed to the poor, with the aim of illuminating face-to-face interactions between practitioners, their peers and competitors (from housewife to apothecary to learned physician), and patients. In a seventeenth-century context, printed texts could be seen as proxies for the author’s spoken address to a specific audience or audiences. This brought them within the constraints of spoken decorum, itself governed by which topics were considered proper for which rank. The chapter looks at the paratexts to Thomas Law’s Physick for the Poor (1657) and shows how they constitute a set of relationships between medical professionals, amateurs and patients which were fluid and ephemeral, shifting between coalition and competition in response to social setting.
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- 1.
Mary E. Fissell, ‘The marketplace of print’, in Mark S.R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis eds. Medicine and the Market in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450—c. 1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 108–132, 115, 118. Elizabeth Lane Furdell Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (Rochester, New York: University of Rochester Press, 2002).
- 2.
Mary Chudleigh Essays Upon Several Subjects in Prose and Verse (London: T.H. for R. Bonwicke and others, 1710); Margaret Ezell The Poems and Prose of Mary, Lady Chudleigh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), xvii—xxxiv.
- 3.
Chudleigh Essays, ECCO images 8–9.
- 4.
George Mackenzie Religio Stoici (London: for George Sawbridge, 1663).
- 5.
Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, eds. Robert C. Latham and William Matthews, 11 volumes (London: 1970–1983). vol. VIII, 10 April 1667, 162.
- 6.
William Gouge Of Domesticall Duties: Eight Treatises (London: John Haviland for William Bladen, 1622) EEBO image 152.
- 7.
A Complete Collection of State-trials, and Proceedings upon High-Treason, and other Crimes and Misdemeanour, third vol. (London: for J. Walthoe and others, 1730) 2nd ed., ECCO image 879.
- 8.
Richard Baxter, The Poor Man’s Family Book (London: R.W. for Nevill Simmons, 1674). Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heauen (London: for Robert Dexter, 1601).
- 9.
Thomas Law Naturall Experiments or Physick for the Poor (London: for Edward Farnham, 1657).
- 10.
Nicholas Culpeper A Physicall Directory, or, A Translation of the London Dispensatory (London: for Peter Cole, 1649). Nicholas Culpeper A Physical Directory (London: for Peter Cole), 1651, 3rd ed., EEBO image 1.
- 11.
Thomas Cock, Kitchin-Physick: or Advice to the Poor, by way of Dialogue…with rules and directions how to prevent sickness and cure Diseases by Diet (London: for J.B., 1676).
- 12.
Culpeper Directory 1651, 3rd ed., EEBO image 3.
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Culpeper Directory 1651, 3rd ed., EEBO image 5.
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Law Physic for the Poor EEBO image 3.
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Law Physick for the Poor EEBO image 3.
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Law Physick for the Poor EEBO image 3.
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Law Physick for the Poor EEBO image 3.
- 18.
Law Physick for the Poor EEBO image 4.
- 19.
Law Physick for the Poor EEBO images 65, 70.
- 20.
Law Physick for the Poor EEBO images 61–63.
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Law Physick for the Poor EEBO image 62.
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Law Physick for the Poor EEBO image 62.
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Law Physick for the Poor EEBO image 78.
- 24.
Law Physick for the Poor EEBO image 4.
- 25.
On early modern meanings of ‘capacity’, see Jajdelska Speech , Print and Decorum 2016, 454.
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Jajdelska, E. (2018). The Medical Paratext as a Voice in the Patient’s Chamber: Speech and Print in Physick for the Poor (1657). In: Tweed, H.C., Scott, D.G. (eds) Medical Paratexts from Medieval to Modern. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73426-2_7
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