Abstract
Early modern authors of medical and midwifery books invariably identified body size – whether too fat or too thin – as a cause of reproductive dysfunction; this chapter investigates thin bodies and infertility. Ideas about the likely infertility of very thin bodies were derived from ancient classical models of reproduction but resonated in early modern society, especially as diseases that might cause sickness and wasting were prevalent, and the poor might struggle to achieve an adequate diet. The generative success of couples was the foundation of social, economic, political, and religious stability but mortality, especially infant, was high. Promotion of fertility and provision of treatments for infertility were thus continuing concerns. Although there was little change during this period, some shifts in thinking occurred in the eighteenth century reflecting new theories about conception, foetal nutrition in utero, causes of miscarriage, how birth is initiated, and emergent eighteenth-century anxieties about masturbation.
This work was generously supported by the British Academy, grant number SG–41058, and by the Wellcome Trust, grant number WT085433.
Note on spelling: in quotations from primary sources typographical differences have been modernized (e.g., ‘u’ for ‘v’, ‘j’ for ‘i’, ‘s’ for long ‘f’).
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Notes
- 1.
Title quotation from Nicholas Fonteyn (or Fontanus), The Womans Doctour: Or, An Exact and Distinct Explanation of all Such Diseases as are Peculiar to that Sex (London, 1652), p. 137.
- 2.
Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT, and London, 2003), p. 114.
- 3.
Jennifer Evans, ‘“They are called Imperfect men”: Male Infertility and Sexual Health in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, 29:2 (2016); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1995); Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England, Honour, Sex and Marriage (London and New York, 1999); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003).
- 4.
Sarah Toulalan, ‘“Unfit for Generation”: Body Size and Reproduction’, in Raymond Stephanson and Darren N. Wagner (eds), The Secrets of Generation: Reproduction in the Long Eighteenth Century (Toronto, 2015); Sarah Toulalan, ‘“To[o] much eating stifles the child”: Fat Bodies and Reproduction in Early Modern England’, Historical Research, 87:235 (2014).
- 5.
Jennifer Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2014); Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven, CT, 1995); Sarah Toulalan, ‘“Elderly years cause a Total dispaire of Conception”: Old Age, Sex and Infertility in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, 29:2 (2016).
- 6.
E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London, 1981), pp. 161–2, 234–6.
- 7.
Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities: 1700–1900 (Basingstoke, 1997), p. 26.
- 8.
Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 141–5; Porter and Hall, Facts of Life, pp. 52–3.
- 9.
Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Oxford, 1990); Angus McLaren, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century (London, 1984).
- 10.
Patricia Crawford and Sara Mendelson, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998); Patricia Crawford, ‘The Construction and Experience of Maternity in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Valerie Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England (London and New York, 1990).
- 11.
Gowing, Common Bodies; Laura Gowing, ‘Secret Births and Infanticide in Seventeenth-Century England’, Past & Present, 156 (1997); Cathy McClive, ‘The Hidden Truths of the Belly: The Uncertainties of Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe’, Social History of Medicine, 15:2 (2002); Linda A. Pollock, ‘Embarking on a Rough Passage: The Experience of Pregnancy in Early-Modern Society’, in Fildes (ed.), Women as Mothers.
- 12.
Gowing, Common Bodies, pp. 42–7.
- 13.
Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination; Foyster, Manhood; Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago, IL, and London, 2007); Jeffrey Merrick, ‘Impotence in Court and at Court’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 25 (1996); Janet C. Mueller, ‘Fallen Men: Representations of Male Impotence in Britain’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 25 (1996).
- 14.
Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster, ‘Childless Men in Early Modern England’, in Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (eds), The Family in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2007); Evans, ‘“They are called Imperfect men”’; Jennifer Evans, ‘“It is caused of the womans part or of the mans part”: The Role of Gender in the Diagnosis and Treatment of Sexual Dysfunction in Early Modern England’, Women’s History Review, 20:3 (2011), pp. 445–6.
- 15.
For example, Lisa Wynne Smith, ‘La Raillerie Des Femmes? Les femmes, la stérilité et la société en France à l’époque moderne’, in Cathy McClive et Nicole Pellegrin (eds), Femmes en fleurs, femmes en corps: Sang, Santé, Sexualités du Moyen Âge aux Lumières (Saint-Étienne, 2010), p. 211. I provide a broad overview in ‘“Unfit for Generation”’.
- 16.
Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, IL, and London, 1985); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA, 1992), especially pp. 7, 115; Walter Vandereycken and Ron Van Deth, ‘Miraculous Maids: Self-Starvation and Fasting Girls’, History Today, 43 (1993).
- 17.
For example, E.R. Hoffman, S.C. Zerwas, and C.M. Bulik, ‘Reproductive Issues in Anorexia Nervosa’, Expert Review of Obstetrics & Gynecology, 6:4 (2011).
- 18.
Gowing, Common Bodies, pp. 41–8, 71–3.
- 19.
Wynne Smith, ‘La Raillerie Des Femmes?’, p.211. My translation.
- 20.
Victor Cornelius Medvei, ‘The Illness and Death of Mary Tudor’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 80 (1987), pp. 768–9.
- 21.
Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615), p. 74.
- 22.
Toulalan, ‘“Elderly years”’.
- 23.
Eucharius Röesslin, The Byrth of Mankynde newly translated out of Laten into Englysshe, trans. Richard Jonas (London, 1540 [1513]), X.iii.r. Thomas Raynald reproduces the paragraph in his adapted translation: Thomas Raynald, The Birth of Man-kinde; Otherwise Named The Womans Booke (London, 1626), pp. 190–1.
- 24.
Felix Plater, A Golden Practice of Physick (London, 1662), p. 501. Abdiah Cole and Nicholas Culpeper are listed as authors on the title page of Plater’s earlier text, but Mary Rhinelander McCarl credits them only with the translation: Mary Rhinelander McCarl, ‘Publishing the Works of Nicholas Culpeper, Astrological Herbalist and Translator of Latin Medical Works in 17th-Century London’, Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 13 (1996), p. 269.
- 25.
Santorio Santorio (1561–1636). See Lois N. Magner, A History of the Life Sciences (New York, 1979), p. 132.
- 26.
Pat Rogers, ‘Fat is a Fictional Issue: The Novel and the Rise of Weight-Watching’, in E. Levy-Navarro (ed.) Historicizing Fat in Anglo-American Culture (Columbus, OH, 2010), pp. 23–4; fn 16, p. 37; Anita Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne (Norman, OK, 2000); Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat (New York and London, 1986), p. 17.
- 27.
Jean Prevotius, Medicaments for the Poor; Or, Physick for the Common People…Translated into English, and Something added, By Nich. Culpeper(London, 1656), p. 350.
- 28.
William Salmon, Aristotle’s Compleat and Experience’d Midwife (London, 1700), p. 131.
- 29.
S.A.D. Tissot, A Treatise On The Crime of Onan, trans. from 3rd edn (London, 1766), p. 31.
- 30.
Tissot, Treatise, p. 200.
- 31.
Lazare Rivière (or Lazarus Riverius), The Practice of Physick, Etc., trans. Nicholas Culpeper, Abdiah Cole and William Rowland (London, 1655 [1640]), p. 513.
- 32.
Philip Barrough, The Methode of Phisicke, Conteyning the Causes, Signes, and Cures of Inward diseases in mans body from the head to the foote (London, 1583), p. 145.
- 33.
Anon., A Supplement to the Onania, Or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, And all its frightful Consequences, in the two Sexes, consider’d, &c. (London, 1724), p. 91.
- 34.
Tissot, Treatise, p. 31.
- 35.
Plater, Golden Practice, p. 501.
- 36.
Rogers, ‘Fat is a Fictional Issue’, pp. 23–4; Schwartz, Never Satisfied, p. 17; Plater, Golden Practice, pp. 501–2.
- 37.
Plater, Golden Practice, p. 501.
- 38.
Plater, Golden Practice, pp. 501–2.
- 39.
Toulalan, ‘“Elderly years”’.
- 40.
Lorenz Heister, A Compendium of Anatomy (London, 1721; Latin edition 1717), pp. 166–7.
- 41.
Véronique Nahoum-Grappe, ‘The Beautiful Woman’, in Natalie Zemon Davis and Arlette Farge (eds), A History of Women: Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes (Cambridge, MA, 1993), pp. 98–9; Mary Rogers, ‘Beauty and Concepts of the Ideal’, in Linda Kalof and William Bynum (eds), A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Renaissance (Oxford and New York, 2010); David M. Turner, ‘The Body Beautiful’, in C. Reeves (ed.), A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Enlightenment (Oxford and New York, 2010), pp. 120–2.
- 42.
Plater, Golden Practice, p. 501; Naomi Baker, Plain Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture (Manchester, 2010), pp. 44–6.
- 43.
Alanna Skuse, ‘Wombs, Worms and Wolves: Constructing Cancer in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, 27:4 (2014), especially pp. 641–4; Alanna Skuse, Constructions of Cancer in Early Modern England: Ravenous Natures (London, 2015).
- 44.
Prevotius, Medicaments, pp. 350–1.
- 45.
Alexander Roberts, A Treatise of Witchcraft (London, 1616), p. 17; Daniel Sennert, Practical Physick: The Fourth Book In Three Parts…Also a Tractate of the Cure of Infants (London, 1664), pp. 267–70.
- 46.
G. Tourney, ‘The Physician and Witchcraft in Restoration England’, in Brian P. Levack (ed.), Articles on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology (New York and London, 1992), vol. 6, p. 296.
- 47.
Thomas Vicary, A Profitable Treatise of the Anatomie of Mans Body (London, 1577), Bivr.
- 48.
Andrew Fyfe (ed.), A System of Anatomy and Physiology, with the Comparative Anatomy of Animals (Edinburgh, 1791), p. 475.
- 49.
James Drake, Anthropologia Nova: Or, A New System of Anatomy, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1717), p. 19.
- 50.
Fyfe, System of Anatomy, p. 473.
- 51.
William Salmon, Synopsis Medicinae, 2nd edn (London, 1681), pp. 946–7.
- 52.
Robert Barret, A Companion for Midwives, Child-Bearing Women, and Nurses (London, 1699), p. 62.
- 53.
Röesslin, Byrth of Mankynde, X.iii.r; Raynald, Birth of Man-kinde, pp. 190–1.
- 54.
Matthew Cobb, The Egg and Sperm Race: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex, Life and Growth (London, 2007), pp. 243–6.
- 55.
Salmon, Aristotle’s Compleat and Experience’d Midwife, p. 131; Culpepper’s Compleat and Experience’d Midwife (London, 1718), p. 129, and fifth edition (1752), pp. 170–1.
- 56.
Toulalan, ‘“To[o] much eating”’.
- 57.
Röesslin, Byrth of Mankynde, Xiir-Xiiv.
- 58.
Barret, Companion, p. 62.
- 59.
Sennert, Practical Physick, p. 26.
- 60.
Jean Astruc, A Treatise on all the Diseases Incident to Women (London, 1743), p. 342.
- 61.
Astruc, Treatise, p. 346.
- 62.
Astruc, Treatise, p. 338.
- 63.
Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p. 159; Astruc, Treatise, p. 349.
- 64.
Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p. 159.
- 65.
Susan Broomhall, ‘“Women’s Little Secrets”: Defining the Boundaries of Reproductive Knowledge in Sixteenth-Century France’, Social History of Medicine, 15:1 (2002); Cathy McClive, ‘L’âge des fleurs: le passage de l’enfance à l’adolescence dans l’imaginaire médical du XVIIe siècle’, Biblio, 17 (2007); Cathy McClive, ‘Quand les fleurs s’arrêtent: la ménopause et l’imaginaire médical aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’, in McClive and Pellegrin (eds), Femmes en fleurs, femmes en corps; Sara Read, Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2013); Toulalan, ‘“Elderly years”’.
- 66.
John Freind, Emmenologia, trans. T. Dale (London, 1729 [1703]), p. 52.
- 67.
Freind, Emmenologia, p. 52.
- 68.
John Ball, The Female Physician: Or, Every Woman Her Own Doctress (London, 1770), p. 17. See John Aitken, Principles of Anatomy and Physiology, 2 vols (London, 1786), p. 148.
- 69.
Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p. 145.
- 70.
Peter Chamberlain, Dr. Chamberlain’s Midwifes Practice: Or, A Guide for Women In that High Concern of Conception, Breeding, and Nursing Children (London, 1665), p. 228.
- 71.
Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p. 145.
- 72.
Chamberlain, Midwifes Practice, p. 228.
- 73.
Freind, Emmenologia, p. 52.
- 74.
Toulalan, ‘“To[o] much eating”’, pp. 89–90.
- 75.
Sennert, Practical Physick, pp. 22, 27.
- 76.
Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p. 147.
- 77.
Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p. 147.
- 78.
Jennifer Evans, ‘“Gentle Purges corrected with hot Spices, whether they work or not, do vehemently provoke Venery”: Menstrual Provocation and Procreation in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, 25 (2012).
- 79.
Fonteyn, The Womans Doctour, p. 137.
- 80.
Röesslin, Byrth of Mankynde, X.iii.r; Raynald, Birth of Man-kinde, pp. 190–1.
- 81.
On manhood and paternity see Berry and Foyster, ‘Childless Men’ and Foyster, Manhood; on the importance of maternity see Gowing, Common Bodies, p. 114; on cuckolding and social disruption see Sarah Toulalan, Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford, 2007), pp. 213–17; David Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660–1740 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 85–94.
- 82.
Ambroise Paré, Of the Generation of Man, Book 24 in The Workes of that famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, trans. Thomas Johnson (London, 1634 [1573]), p. 931.
- 83.
John Floyer, ΨΥΧΡΟΛΟΥΣΙΆ (Psychrolousia): Or, The History Of Cold Bathing: Both Ancient and Modern, 2nd edn (London, 1706), p. 184.
- 84.
Anon., Physical Essays on the Parts of the Human Body and Animal Oeconomy (London, 1734), p. 137.
- 85.
Anon., Aristoteles Master-piece, Or The Secrets of Generation displayed in all the parts thereof (London, 1684), p. 89.
- 86.
Anon., A Supplement to the Onania, p. 140; Tissot, Treatise, p. 31.
- 87.
Anon., Of the Crime of Onan Or, The Hainous Vice of Self-Defilement with all its Dismal Consequences etc. (London, 1724), pp. 14–15.
- 88.
McLaren, Impotence, p. 84; Porter and Hall, Facts of Life, pp.52–3; Toulalan, Imagining Sex, pp. 62–4.
- 89.
Floyer, History Of Cold Bathing, p. 184.
- 90.
Paré, Generation of Man, p. 931.
- 91.
Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, p. 157.
- 92.
Rivière, Practice of Physick, p. 513.
- 93.
Röesslin, Byrth of Mankynde, L.ir.
- 94.
Anon., Aristotle’s Manual of Choice Secrets, Shewing The Whole Mystery of Generation (London, 1699), p. 62.
- 95.
Wynne Smith, ‘La Raillerie Des Femmes?’, p. 208.
- 96.
Paré, Generation of Man, 1691 edn, p. 560.
- 97.
Rivière, Practice of Physick, p. 513.
- 98.
Jeffrey R. Watt, ‘The Impact of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation’, in David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbaglio (eds), The History of the European Family, Volume One: Family Life in Early Modern Times 1500–1789 (New Haven, CT, and London, 2001), pp.125–54; Beatrice Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age (New York and Oxford, 1993), especially chapters 3 and 6.
- 99.
Anthony Fletcher, ‘The Protestant Idea of Marriage’, in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (eds), Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 1994).
- 100.
Bell, Holy Anorexia; Jürgen Beyer, ‘A Lübeck Prophet in Local and Lutheran Context’, in Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson (eds), Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800 (Basingstoke, 1996); Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (Oxford, 2002); Susan Hardman Moore, ‘“Such Perfecting of Praise out of the Mouth of a Babe”: Sarah Wight as Child Prophet’, in Diana Wood, The Church and Childhood (Oxford, 1994); Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints: Pretense of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice, 1618–1750 (Baltimore, MD, and London, 2001); Vandereycken and Van Deth, ‘Miraculous Maids’; Alexandra Walsham, ‘‘‘Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings”: Prophecy, Puritanism, and Childhood in Elizabethan Suffolk’, in Wood (ed.), The Church and Childhood, especially pp. 293–7.
- 101.
Jennifer Evans and Sara Read, ‘“before midnight she had miscarried”: Women, Men, and Miscarriage in Early Modern England’, Journal of Family History, 40:1 (2015).
- 102.
Rivière, Practice of Physick, p. 513.
- 103.
William Drage, Physical Experiments (London, 1668), p. 350.
- 104.
François Mauriceau, The Diseases of Women with Child, and in Child-bed (London, 1672 [1668]), p. 132.
- 105.
Röesslin, Byrth of Mankynde, L.ii; Raynald, Birth of Man-kinde, pp. 133–4.
- 106.
Chamberlain, Midwifes Practice, p. 154; John Maubray, The Female Physician, Containing all the Diseases Incident to that Sex, in Virgins, Wives, and Widows (London, 1724), p. 119.
- 107.
Röesslin, Byrth of Mankynde, L.iii.
- 108.
Rivière, Practice of Physick, p. 513.
- 109.
Röesslin, Byrth of Mankynde, XLiii; Raynald, Birth of Man-kinde, pp. 134–5.
- 110.
Röesslin, Byrth of Mankynde, L.ir-L.iv; Raynald, Birth of Man-kinde, pp. 132–3.
- 111.
Maubray, Female Physician, p. 119
- 112.
Maubray, Female Physician, p. 130.
- 113.
John Pechey, A General Treatise of the Diseases of Maids, Bigbellied Women, Child-bed-Women, and Widows, Together with the Best Methods of Preventing or Curing the same (London, 1696), p. 100.
- 114.
Fonteyn, Womans Doctour, p. 169.
- 115.
Pechey, General Treatise, p. 112. See also Röesslin, Byrth of Mankynde, Miiv; Raynald, Birth of Man-kinde, pp. 139–40.
- 116.
Jane Sharp, The Midwive’s Book, Or the whole Art of Midwifry Discovered (London, 1671), pp. 175, 190.
- 117.
Fonteyn, Womans Doctour, p. 137.
- 118.
William Smellie, A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery, 5th edn (Dublin, 1764 [1752–64]), p. 87.
- 119.
Smellie, Treatise, p. 108.
- 120.
See discussions in John Burton, An Essay towards a Complete New System of Midwifry, Theoretical and Practical (London, 1751), pp. 64–81, especially p. 80, and James Wolveridge, Speculum Matricis; Or, the Expert Midwives Handmaid (London, 1671), p. 104.
- 121.
Sennert, Practical Physick, p. 172.
- 122.
Maubray, Female Physician, p. 121.
- 123.
John Pechey, The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged, 5th edn (London, 1698), p. 63.
- 124.
Thomas Denman, An Introduction to the Practice of Midwifery, 2 vols (London, 1795), vol. 1, p. 330.
- 125.
Denman, Introduction, p. 331. Scottish physician John Aitken had earlier simply stated, ‘The child is entirely passive during parturition’: John Aitken, Principles of Anatomy and Physiology, 2 vols (London, 1786), p. 60.
- 126.
Denman, Introduction, pp. 332–4.
- 127.
Chamberlain, Midwifes Practice, p. 156.
- 128.
Sennert, Practical Physick, p. 173. On the dangers of miscarriage: Evans and Read, ‘“before midnight”’.
- 129.
Maubray, Female Physician, p. 122.
- 130.
Maubray, Female Physician, p. 127.
- 131.
Rivière, Practice of Physick, p. 514.
- 132.
John Stedman, Physiological Essays and Observations (Edinburgh and London, 1769), p. 90.
- 133.
Denman, Introduction, vol. 2, pp. 191, 319.
- 134.
Denman, Introduction, vol. 2, pp. 191, 321.
- 135.
Jean-Louis.Baudelocque, A System of Midwifery, trans. John Heath, 3 vols (London, 1790 [1775]), p.466; Denman, Introduction, vol. 2, pp.191, 321.
- 136.
Martha Mears, The Pupil of Nature; or Candid Advice to the Fair Sex, on the Subjects of Pregnancy; Childbirth; the Diseases Incident to both etc. (London, 1797), p. 70.
Research Resources
Primary Sources
Sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth-century medical and midwifery books can be found in the British Library and in the Wellcome Trust Library on Euston Road, London. Many can be found online in Early English Books Online and in Eighteenth-Century Collections Online. The Wellcome Trust Library also has many manuscript receipt books. Useful edited collections include: Irma Taavitsainen and Paivi Pahta (eds), Early Modern English Medical Texts: Corpus Description and Studies (Amsterdam, 2010), a book and CD which is the second part of a three-part series covering medical writing 1375–1800; Pam Lieske (ed.), Eighteenth-Century British Midwifery, 4 vols (London, 2009).
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Fertility and Contraception
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John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Robert V. Schnucker, ‘Elizabethan Birth Control and Puritan Attitudes’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 4 (1975), 655–67.
E.A. Wrigley, ‘Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XIX:1 (1966), 82–109.
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Fasting and Sainthood
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Vintage Books, 2000).
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The Early Modern Medical World and Publishing
Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
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Reproduction, Gynaecology and Obstetrics
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Toulalan, S. (2017). ‘If slendernesse be the cause of unfruitfulnesse; you must nourish and fatten the body’: Thin Bodies and Infertility in Early Modern England. In: Davis, G., Loughran, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Infertility in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52080-7_10
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