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E-book Misery to Mirth : Recovery from Illness in Early Modern England

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Penilaian

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The history of early modern medicine often makes for depressing reading. It implies that people fell ill, took ineffective remedies, and died. A few snippets from Roy and Dorothy Porter’s classic study, In Sickness and in Health, encapsulate this pes-simism: they speak of the ‘universal sickness, suffering, and woe’ of the early mod-ern past, a time in which ‘people died like flies’ from infections against which ‘pre-modern medicine had few effective weapons’.1 Even those who were lucky enough to survive illness could expect nothing more than a life ‘repeatedly blighted’ by chronic illness and disability.2 Indeed, the recovery of full health is sometimes said to have been so rare, that it barely existed as a concept at this time, or at least not in any form that would be recognized today. Nancy Siraisi, for instance, has stated that ‘cure was not necessarily conceived of as a . . . recognizable return to total health’: early modern people held ‘a more vague and diffused concept of recovery’.3 For these reasons, numerous histories have been written on disease and death, but none have been devoted to the subjects of recovery and survival. Such a focus may also reflect a more general penchant for sad topics, a tendency visible in many historiograph-ical fields and chronologies, especially the history of emotion, an area largely dom-inated by the study of negative feelings.4 Psychologists would not be surprised—they believe humankind suffers from a ‘negativity bias’, or ‘positive-negative asymmetry ffect’.5 This trend was noticed in the early modern period too: ‘Tis strange that we should be more ready to mourn than to rejoyce; and that our Sorrows should be more . . . fluent than our joys’, mused the London clergyman Timothy Rogers in 1691.6Such a gloomy picture of the past does not adequately capture the diversity of human experiences, however. While preparing my first book, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, I found, scattered amidst the heartrending stories of suffering and death, joyful recoveries. One in particular stood out. In 1652, eleven-year-old Martha Hatfield from Yorkshire fell gravely ill of ‘Spleen-winde’, a disease charac-terized by ‘violent vomiting’ and ‘rigid convulsions’. For nine months, her parents and other relations were ‘continually under sadnesse, and their sleep broken’; they longed for God to ‘raise her up . . . to health’, and ‘ease . . . her pain, [so] that [their] eares . . . might not be filled with such dolefull cries, nor their hearts with those fears and amazements’. At nine o’clock one December evening, Martha suddenly felt strength returning to her limbs. She told her father, ‘It trickled down, and came into [my] thighs, knees, and ancles, like warm water’. Seeing her mother by her bedside, she ‘rejoyced . . . with laughing . . . and clasping her armes about her neck’ in an embrace. The next morning, Martha ‘took some food without spilling’, and told her parents she’d had ‘a very good night’, not waking until ‘seven a clock’. In the afternoon, she ‘played with some . . . toys . . . which Neighbours had brought her in a . . . Basket’, and towards the evening, her older sister Hannah, who had been ‘very tender of her’ during her illness, ‘took her up, and set her upon her feet, and she stood by herself without holding, which she had not done for three quar-ters of a year’. Over the following weeks, Martha ‘encreased in strength’ beyond ‘all expectation’, and finally announced to her family, ‘me is pretty well, I praise God . . . I am neither sick, nor have any pain’. A day of thanksgiving was arranged to praise the Lord for ‘such a glorious end to this affliction’: one of the guests recalled that the sight of Martha ‘com[ing] forth into the Hall to . . . welcome us . . . was wonderfull in our eyes, so that our hearts did rejoyce with a kind of trembling’.7Martha’s story was penned and published by her uncle, the Sheffield minister James Fisher, to celebrate and commemorate his niece’s restoration to health (Figure 1). Although it is partly didactic in nature, designed to ‘teach . . . all that hear of it to depend upon the Lord’, the author portrays recovery in a way that would have made sense to many people at this time.8 Getting better is depicted as a ‘happie motion’ from anguish to elation, a trajectory marked and measured by a number of key milestones, such as sleeping through the night, eating solid foods, and standing unaided. The account inspired the subject of the present study not only by revealing that recovery was thought to be possible in early modern England, but by showing that descriptions of this outcome of illness have the potential to shine light into practically every corner of life in the past. In times of health, people were often too busy to remark on such things as breakfast routines, bodily sensa-tion, and family relationships; in severe sickness, they were usually too unwell to be able to do so. But, the transformation from sickness to health propelled all the normally unnoticed facets of human existence to the forefront of people’s minds and personal writings.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

610 NEW m

Penerbit

London : Oxford University Press., 2018

Deskripsi Fisik

287 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780198779025

Klasifikasi

610

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

-

Subjek

Medicine and Health

Info Detail Spesifik

-

Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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