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Discover the remarkable birth of modern medicine... and how not to die in the Renaissance
'An entertaining history of medicine... Skuse brings a deep familiarity with the contemporary sources and a dry wit.' Dan Jones, The Sunday Times The cliched view medicine in the Renaissance world is dreadful: gore-splattered hacksaws, arsenic concoctions, the four humours and all those leeches... Reality, however, proves somewhat different. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a medical revolution was afoot. Physicians' education was being formalised. Surgeons were documenting the intricacies of the human body with ever-greater skill. And, as European powers expanded into the New World, novel medicines and treatments were being discovered. Alanna Skuse ventures into the bustling medical marketplace of Renaissance England - a world of travelling surgeons, prosthetics craftsmen, faith healers and snake oil merchants.
'An entertaining history of medicine... Skuse brings a deep familiarity with the contemporary sources and a dry wit.' Dan Jones, The Sunday Times The cliched view medicine in the Renaissance world is dreadful: gore-splattered hacksaws, arsenic concoctions, the four humours and all those leeches... Reality, however, proves somewhat different. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a medical revolution was afoot. Physicians' education was being formalised. Surgeons were documenting the intricacies of the human body with ever-greater skill. And, as European powers expanded into the New World, novel medicines and treatments were being discovered. Alanna Skuse ventures into the bustling medical marketplace of Renaissance England - a world of travelling surgeons, prosthetics craftsmen, faith healers and snake oil merchants.
- Discover domestic healers like Elizabeth Freke, a doyenne of folk remedies, always ready to dole out tonics and elixirs to her ailing neighbours.
- Browse the shelves of the early modern apothecary with Nicholas Culpeper as he lays the groundwork for the modern pharmacy.
- Meet the expert midwife Jane Sharp, successful author and pioneer of women's health.
- Join the intrepid plague doctor George Thomson as he braves London's Great Plague.
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