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Reading Remedy Books: Manuscripts and the Making of a National Medical Tradition

Air date: Thursday, November 2, 2023, 2:00:00 PM
Time displayed is Eastern Time, Washington DC Local
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Description: NLM History of Medicine

Around the turn of the fifteenth century, ordinary English people (merchants, village priests, and well-to-do farmers) found themselves with the means, for the first time, to create books of medical knowledge. Hundreds of the manuscripts they filled with medical recipes, herbals, and prognostications survive in archives across Britain and the United States—three of them at the NLM. As bespoke collections, these manuscripts reveal something of the attitudes and interests of their original fifteenth-century patrons, but they were also living books: many were altered and amended by subsequent readers who shaped them to suit their own ends. Dr. Reynolds’s talk explores the many meanings that accrued to these medical manuscripts over time, from the early fifteenth century when accessing medical knowledge in the vernacular was still something of a novelty, through the sixteenth century, when the technology of print profoundly altered the circulation of medical knowledge in England. Drawing on material from her first book, Dr. Reynolds will show how sixteenth-century readers became amateur archivists, using century-old remedy books to construct an imagined national medical tradition. 
Author: Melissa B. Reynolds, PhD, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Wolf Humanities Center; Lecturer, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
Runtime: 1 hour