Ill Composed

Download or read book Ill Composed written by Olivia Weisser and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-01 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first in-depth study of how gender determined perceptions and experiences of illness in early modern England, Olivia Weisser invites readers into the lives and imaginations of ordinary seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal diaries, medical texts, and devotional literature, this unique cultural history enters the sickrooms of a diverse sampling of men and women, from a struggling Manchester wigmaker to the diarist Samuel Pepys. The resulting stories of sickness offer unprecedented insight into what it was like to live, suffer, and inhabit a body in England more than three centuries ago.