This important collection of Margaret Pelling's essays brings together her key studies of health, medicine and poverty in Tudor and Stuart England - including a number published here for the first time. They show that - then as now - health and medical care were everyday obsessions of ordinary people in the Tudor and Stuart era. Margaret Pelling's book brings this vital dimension of the early modern world in from the periphery of specialist study to the heart of the concerns of social, economic and cultural historians.
Introduction.
PART ONE THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT
1. Medicine and the Environment in Shakespeare's England.
2. Food, Status and Knowledge: Attitudes to Diet in Early Modern England.
3. Illness among the Poor in Early Modern English Towns.
4. Healing the Sick Poor: Social Policy and Disability in Norwich 1550-1640.
PART TWO AGE GROUPS AND GENDER
5. Child Health as a Social Value in Early Modern England.
6. Old Age, Poverty and Disability in Early Modern Norwich: Work, Remarriage and Other Expedients.
7. Older Women: Household, Caring and Other Occupations in the Late Sixteenth-century Town.
PART THREE OCCUPATIONS
8. Nurses and Nursekeepers: Problems of Identification in the Early Modern Period.
9. Occupational Diversity: Barber-surgeons and other Trades 1550-1640.
10. Trade or Profession? Medical Practice in Early Modern England.
