In the Family Circle

This chapter discusses the role that family and community played when it came to health and medicine. People were rarely left alone to struggle with physical afflictions. They were surrounded by both immediate and more distant relations as well as neighbours, among whom there was usually no shortage of home-grown specialists or concerned advisers. They had the choice to seek relief from practices based on folk beliefs or those founded upon conventional medicine. Early modern medicine prioritized the decisions taken by the patients themselves. Doctors subordinated their judgement to their patients' narratives, and were expected to pay more attention to the sick person's interpretation of their own illness. There are four basic 'grades' of action in case of ailments: ignoring them; taking a home-made remedy or tried and trusted medication; treatment by a healer; and, if all else failed, consultation with a medical professional. The choice of treatment procedure depended on a range of factors: the severity of the illness, the patient's personality, their familiarity with treatment methods and the range of remedies stocked in the medicine cupboard at home, the availability of official and unofficial medical or paramedical services, and the financial standing of the patient and those in his or her immediate circle.

A Frog Under the Tongue

Jews have been active participants in shaping the healing practices of the communities of eastern Europe. Their approach largely combined the ideas of traditional Ashkenazi culture with the heritage of medieval and early modern medicine. Holy rabbis and faith healers, as well as Jewish barbers, innkeepers, and pedlars, all dispensed cures, purveyed folk remedies for different ailments, and gave hope to the sick and their families based on kabbalah, numerology, prayer, and magical Hebrew formulas. Nevertheless, as new sources of knowledge penetrated the traditional world, modern medical ideas gained widespread support. Jews became court physicians to the nobility, and when the universities were opened up to them many also qualified as doctors. At every stage, medicine proved an important field for cross-cultural contacts. Jewish historians and scholars of folk medicine alike will discover here fascinating sources never previously explored — manuscripts, printed publications, and memoirs in Yiddish and Hebrew but also in Polish, English, German, Russian, and Ukrainian. The author's careful study of these documents has teased out therapeutic advice, recipes, magical incantations, kabbalistic methods, and practical techniques, together with the ethical considerations that such approaches entailed. The research fills a gap in the study of folk medicine in eastern Europe, shedding light on little-known aspects of Ashkenazi culture, and on how the need to treat sickness brought Jews and their neighbours together.

Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine

During early modernity, medico-legal concerns with timing puberty gave way to physiological and medical-hygienic concerns with pubertal timing. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical-jurisprudential tracts isolated rare cases of conception before the legal marriage age. Scattered reports of “monstrously” early menarche and “prodigious” male puberty were offered from the latter half of the seventeenth century. Tied to excess heat, moisture, plethora and climate since antiquity, in the second half of the eighteenth century pubertal timing attracted sustained commentary regarding the purported role of social stressors, from novel-reading to diet and trousers. Both the known variability and strikingly outlying instances of pubertal timing thus provided an inroad to unravelling such perennial explanatory devices as temperament, constitution, and life style. Despite and in part because of its explanatory significance in early modern physiology, leading eighteenth-century nosologists did not yet itemize precocious puberty. One precocious boy described in the 1740s, the Willingham Prodigy, provided the best documented early medical and public response. Formal nosological interest followed by the 1760s, initially under Haller’s heading of excessive growth (incrementum nimium, tied to enhanced circulation) and only much later under Meckel the Younger’s heading of premature development (vorschnelle Entwicklung).

Early Modern Medicine in Manuscript and Print

The standardisation process of English spelling largely came to its conclusion during the Early Modern period. While the progress of standardisation has been studied in both printed and manuscript texts, few studies have looked at these processes side by side, especially focusing on the same genre of writing and by using corpora that are sufficiently large for quantitative comparison. Using two Early Modern medical corpora, one based on manuscripts and the other on printed sources, this paper compares the trajectories of spelling standardisation in the two textual domains and shows that while spelling standardisation progressed in an almost linear fashion in printed texts, the manuscripts reveal a much more varied and shallow cline toward standardisation.