Introduction

Abstract

This book explores how ordinary people in the early modern period perceived, experienced and interpreted illness and how they dealt and coped with it in everyday life. In this sense, it is an attempt to write a history of medicine from the patient’s or layperson’s point of view.¹ This approach to the writing of medical history is a comparatively recent undertaking.² For a long time, medical historians were primarily interested in the ‘great physicians’ and their contributions to medical ‘progress’. Patients usually appeared as little more than faceless inmates of medical institutions or as the collective target of public health policies. The sole major exceptions were famous patients – rulers and artists above all – whose diseases and causes of death frequently gave rise to lively debates. Since the mid-1980s, however, in the wake of renewed interest in the social history of medicine,³ historians widened the view to include patients’ experience of disease and medical care. A number of studies have since produced valuable new insights.⁴ Even studies on the history of public health and medical institutions have come to accept the need to pay attention to the needs and experiences of patients.⁵