Prime Time Replay:
Mary Fissell
on the self-help books of the
17th and 18th centuries
MsgId: *breakthrough(1)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:04:53 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
Welcome to Breakthrough Medicine. I'm your host, Madeleine Lebwohl, and today I'm speaking with Mary Fissell. Hi, Mary!
MsgId: *breakthrough(2)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:05:46 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
Hi Madeleine
MsgId: *breakthrough(3)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:09:02 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
You have done extensive research on popular medical books for women in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Many of their concerns and problems are similar to ours today. What was their biggest issue?
MsgId: *breakthrough(4)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:11:52 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
Many of the books I've been reading talk about conception, pregnancy, and childbirth -- topics addressed in advice books today. Of course, some of the explanations are different!
MsgId: *breakthrough(5)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:14:00 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
How were these books used in their time? Were they written for people of moderate literacy?
MsgId: *breakthrough(7)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:19:48 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
Of course, only about half of all women could read in, say, 1750 -- and many of these probably lived in cities. One of the things that fascinates me about these books is that we don't know how they were used. Anyone who has used a modern advice book knows that you don't do everything the book tells you to!Oh, and I should have told you -- I'm looking at books printed in England, books that Englishwomen and American colonists read. Then books were rarer and more costly, relative to today. So at the beginning, I thought that maybe these books were treated very authoritatively -- but once I read them, I wasn't so sure.
MsgId: *breakthrough(9)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:25:19 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
Who wrote these books? Were they concerned with making money in selling them -- did they become celebrities of their day, like self-help book authors today?
MsgId: *breakthrough(10)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:29:05 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
There weren't breakfast TV or book tours then! But these books were written in order to be sold. Authors also had other motivations. For example, Nicholas Culpeper was a radical, a writer who wanted to make medical infoirmation available to anyone. He wrote the famous herbal that bears his name, and a book on reproductin. In these, he had no patience with the stuffy elites of the medical world; he called them foolish and greedy.
MsgId: *breakthrough(11)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:31:12 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
Was he a doctor? Why did he write a book for women, not colleagues? Did women write any of these books?
MsgId: *breakthrough(12)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:35:30 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
Culpeper had a dramatic life. According to the short biograhy in one of his own books, he was studying at a university when he set off to elope with his sweetheart. But before they met up, she was killed by a bolt of lightning. Culpeper never returned to the university; instead he went to London and studied with apothecaries, who were somewhat like pharmacists, except they saw patients and gave advice as well. After being wounded in the English Civil War -- a musket ball to his chest -- he supposedly spent much of the remainder of his life in bed, writing and translating.
MsgId: *breakthrough(13)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:36:48 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
How did he decide to write a book for women? What was medical care like for them?
MsgId: *breakthrough(14)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:39:54 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
Like some of the other books about reproduction, Culpeper's was addressed both to midwives (who delivered almost all babies) and to women. Other books were written by women, although they were outnumbered by men. Some of these female authors were worried about men-midwives; one said that learning anatomy from dead bodies did not teach you to be "just and tender to the living".
MsgId: *breakthrough(15)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:41:13 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
Did these books reflect the cultural or political tone of the time?
MsgId: *breakthrough(17)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:44:01 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
Early-modern Europe as a whole was quite misogynistic, so I sort of expected these books to be in that mold. While they have their misogynist aspects, they are varied. Culpeper, for instance, was a political radical -- his writings were part of his critique of the ruling classes. He wanted everyone to be able to treat themselves, so that they wouldn't need to rely on physicians.Of course, physicians, who were university-trained, were fairly thin an the ground, and they were expensive. In general, there were many kinds of medical practitioners -- and people treated themselves and their neighbors. Confidence in the medical professions was not high, which may help to explain the success of the small books I've been studying.
Women were the prtimary health-care providers in their households -- making medicines was not very different to cooking, and some books have recipes for cakes and pies as well as sore legs and fevers. Since women did not have much access to print, so a good deal of what women knew was never written down. Women often attended each others' childbirths -- maybe 5 or 6 women in addition to the midwife -- so they had a good deal of knowledge gained through experience, but never written down.
MsgId: *breakthrough(21)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:53:21 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
Since some of these books were written by men, were the prejudices of the day, against women, carried into the books?
MsgId: *breakthrough(22)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:55:26 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
I was surprised by the ways in which these books talk about the female body. On the one hand, these descriptions mirror some prejudices -- women, for example, contributed less to the forming of the embryo than did men. Women are described as fields which men plant, or fruit trees which men harvest.But even in these descriptions, there is often another set of implications which make women's roles equally important to men's. Also, some books, especially those by women writers, praise women's bodies, quite unlike other kinds of writing which often degrades the female body.
MsgId: *breakthrough(24)
Date: Wed Oct 29 10:59:02 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
If we saw these books today, would we be able to follow them? Do you know just how popular they were?
MsgId: *breakthrough(25)
Date: Wed Oct 29 11:00:59 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
These books were written in a fairly straightforward manner, and I think that a woman who read one today would find some things very familiar -- although it wasn't called that, these books describe morning sickness.As to how popular these books were in their own day, it is hard to be sure, But publishers didn'y like to lose money, and they published lots of this kind of book. In general, popular health books were published in great numbers -- I have estimated that there was 1 copy of a popular medical book for every 4 households in England. It's a crude estimate, but I think the implication -- that these books were popular -- is clear.
MsgId: *breakthrough(27)
Date: Wed Oct 29 11:06:12 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
What books were written for men?
MsgId: *breakthrough(28)
Date: Wed Oct 29 11:09:40 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
Well, in some ways all books were written for men! Books on health, diet, etc., often imply that their readers are men. but, the only books which are specifically addressed to men are for sailors -- what to do on board ship, far from land, if someone got sick. The other category for men is books on venereal disease. To read some of these, you would never know that women suffered from VD. Women are only portrayed as the carriers of disease. Many VD book were written by people selling remedies for VD, and they often print letters, testimonials from satisfied customers.
MsgId: *breakthrough(30)
Date: Wed Oct 29 11:13:20 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
Do modern readers ever use any of these remedies?
MsgId: *breakthrough(31)
Date: Wed Oct 29 11:14:53 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
Herbal remedies, of course, are increasingly popular. And Culpeper's Herbal has rarely been out of print since it was published in the middle of the seventeenth century.
MsgId: *breakthrough(33)
Date: Wed Oct 29 11:16:02 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
Thank you for joining me today on Breakthrough Medicine. It seems that people still basically want advice books on their shelves.
MsgId: *breakthrough(34)
Date: Wed Oct 29 11:17:46 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
It does seem that, no matter how sophisticated medicine has become, people still want advice books written in their own, non-jargon, language.
MsgId: *breakthrough(35)
Date: Wed Oct 29 11:18:42 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
From the amount of advice books offered today, that seems to be true. Thank you for joining me.
MsgId: *breakthrough(36)
Date: Wed Oct 29 11:19:20 EST 1997
From: Mary_Fissell At: 128.112.209.31
Thank you. Goodbye.
MsgId: *breakthrough(37)
Date: Wed Oct 29 11:21:36 EST 1997
From: moderator At: 152.163.201.140
Please join me next week for Breakthrough Medicine.
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