Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe, a special issue of Renaissance Studies (Vol. 28, no. 4, September 2014; Guest editor: Sharon T. Strocchia), is now available online at:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/rest.2014.28.issue-4/issuetoc

This collection of essays by an international team of scholars brings fresh interpretive perspectives and impressive archival research to bear on the reappraisal of women’s medical activities in early modern Europe. Spanning England and the continent from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the collection situates female practitioners not on the margins of medical practice but rather at the nexus of household medicine, emerging structures of public health, and the production of medical knowledge. The essays demonstrate how increased demand for healthcare services in the early modern period opened new opportunities for women’s participation in a variety of health-related activities, from pharmacy and ‘physick’ to the provision of care. Drawing on a wide range of sources—court records, letters, inventories, printed herbals, parish account books, physicians’ journals, proceedings of state health boards—the collection showcases how innovative public health initiatives capitalized on domestic medical skills and probes sites of knowledge production and exchange outside university and guild settings. Whether spotlighting local artisans and noblewomen who worked without formal compensation or ‘expert’ practitioners who purveyed their skills in the marketplace, the essays cast new light on women’s claims to medical expertise and their self-perception as healers. Taking up issues of importance for Renaissance scholars working across the disciplines, this collection re-orients our understanding of how healthcare was organized, practiced and gendered in early modern Europe.

Table of Contents:

• Sharon T. Strocchia, Introduction: Women and Healthcare in Early Modern Europe
• Debra Blumenthal, Domestic Medicine: Slaves, Servants, and Female Medical Expertise in Late Medieval Valencia
• Alisha Rankin, Exotic Materials and Treasured Knowledge: The Valuable Legacy of Noblewomen’s Remedies in Early Modern Germany
• Elaine Leong, ‘Herbals she peruseth’: Reading Medicine in Early Modern England
• Richelle Munkhoff, Poor Women and Parish Public Health in Sixteenth-Century London
• Jane Stevens Crawshaw, Families, Medical Secrets and Public Health in Early Modern Venice
• Annemarie Kinzelbach, Women and Healthcare in Early Modern German Towns

The articles by Leong and Stevens Crawshaw are available open access, and plans are underway to make the editor’s Introduction open access in the near future.

For further information contact: Sharon Strocchia, Professor of History, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322
http://history.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/strocchia.html

Because of the urgent need to raise public awareness about the on-going outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease in West Africa, I created a special archive of Ebola materials for my undergraduate class, “Global History of Health.” I assembled these materials using the commercial software “Blackboard” that my university supplies us for creating password-protected course content. To share information on these materials and resources more widely, I have posted on my Academia.edu page screen captures of all the folders: https://asu.academia.edu/MonicaHGreen/Global-Health—Teaching-Documents. These PDF files do not, however, have live links to the Internet. I am taking steps to convert the folders to an Internet-accessible form, but that may take some time.

I’ve divided the material into 4 main folders: (1) news/information outlets that are well worth bookmarking in order to stay up on the latest news; (2) a folder of news items I’ve been collecting over the past several

months; (3) some items from around the time of the initial discovery of Ebola in 1976 (the films in particular may be helpful, if your library owns them); and (4) some of the key pieces reflecting current scientific knowledge of the disease (genetics, epidemiology, clinical course of the disease, etc.).

To stress, I am not trying to cover all aspects of the disease (e.g., drug or vaccine discovery). From my global health perspective, I am trying to assess the deeper roots of this disease: what larger environmental (including human) factors have contributed to the disease’s emergence overall, and what have led to this particular outbreak. This is just one of many resources available for gathering and disseminating information on this tragic situation. Please let your students know about these resources.

Monica H. Green, Professor of History, Arizona State University, Monica.green@asu.edu

Global History of Health-Teaching Notes on Ebola by Monica H. Green