Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England, by Anne Stobart

Abstract

How did early modern households provide their own care in efforts to maintain health and treat illness? This question drives the inquiry presented by Anne Stobart. Focusing on families living in Somerset, Dorset and Devon, Stobart works to reconstruct the beliefs and practices of early modern men and women as they sought to prevent, treat and recover from illness in daily life. Manuscript sources have been consulted in especial depth, namely household accounts, letters, diaries and medicinal recipe collections. This evidence base has been used to probe four central themes: medical self-help, the role of women in healthcare, changing lay beliefs about health and disease, and the interrelationship between household medicine and developments in commercial medicine. Throughout the text these themes are related to the concept of ‘therapeutic determination’, a term Stobart employs to assess the agency of lay people in determining their healthcare. The resulting picture is complex, revealing a range of ways in which families obtained and used medical supplies and medical services.