Medical Humanities Blog

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Table of Contents: Social History of Medicine 23, no. 3 (2010) Posted: 06 Dec 2010 06:12 AM PST Although the entire TOC for the journal Social History of Medicine should be consumed post-haste by anyone with a remote interest in the subject, I'd like to pick out two papers that appear in the current issue. The first is authored by Hannah Newton (University of Exeter), and is entitled Children's Physic: Medical Perceptions and Treatment of Sick Children in Early Modern England, c. 1580–1720 (subscription required).  Here is the Abstract: Historians of medicine, childhood and paediatrics have often assumed that early modern doctors neither treated children, nor adapted their medicines to suit the peculiar temperaments of the young. Through an examination of medical textbooks and doctors' casebooks, this article refutes these assumptions. It argues that medical authors and practising doctors regularly treated children, and were careful to tailor their remedies to complement the distinctive constitutions of children. Thus, this article proposes that a concept of 'children's physic' existed in early modern England. This term refers to the notion that children were physiologically distinct, requiring special medical care. Children's physic was rooted in the ancient traditions of Hippocratic and Galenic medicine: it was the child's humoral make-up that underpinned all medical ideas about children's bodies, minds, diseases and treatments. Children abounded in the humour blood, which made them humid and weak, and in need of medicines of a particularly gentle nature. I have had the privilege of exchanging some correspondence with Dr. Newton, in part because of my interest in treatments of pain and suffering in the early modern period.  Patient narratives are relatively difficult to come by in the nineteenth century, let alone the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries, and finding material that provides some material for constructing some of the meanings of pain and suffering for illness sufferers during those periods are even more rare, I suspect.  Hence Dr. Newton's analysis of these subjects is both significant in its own right and especially valuable to my own work on the history of pain. Although my work on that subject centers on mid-to-late 19th c.