The Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum (1480) (Wikimedia Commons)

What were the “Non-Naturals”?

juliamartins99Key Concepts

When I was growing up, my grandmother told me to avoid cold showers if I was having my period. I was also not supposed to leave the house with my hair wet unless it was summer. When we travelled to the mountains, my other grandmother would ‘fill her lungs with forest air’. She claimed to feel instantly healthier. I’m sure …

What is the ‘Doctrine of Signatures’?

juliamartins99Key Concepts

In the early modern period, an impotent man might be prescribed boiled orchid roots. But why? Well, they resembled testicles and were consequentially believed to be useful in improving male potency. If you think this sounds weird, stay with me. Efficacy aside, prescribing this remedy makes sense… if you accept the premise of the doctrine of signatures, one of the …

What are the ‘Non-Naturals’?

juliamartins99Key Concepts

When I was growing up, I was told to avoid cold showers if I was having my period. I was also not supposed to leave the house with my hair wet unless it was summer. When we travelled to the mountains, my maternal grandmother would ‘fill her lungs with forest air’. She claimed to feel instantly healthier.

The four humours and their corresponding elements and zodiacal signs. Woodcut in Quinta Essentia by Leonhart Thurneysser (1574). Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

What is the Humoral Theory?

juliamartins99Key Concepts

Humours are everywhere. People can react cholerically to an insult, music can make us melancholic, time with friends can lift our spirits, and we can be in good or bad humour. This is not surprising. The humoral theory has a long history, beginning with the Greek Hippocratic writers in the fifth century BC, being reinterpreted by the Roman physician Galen in the second century AD.

What is Gender History?

juliamartins99Key Concepts

In the 1920s, Virginia Woolf famously described how the history of women was unknown: ‘It has been common knowledge for ages that women exist, bear children, have no beards, and seldom go bald, but save in these respects […] we know little of them and have little evidence upon which to base our conclusions.’ Woolf was writing shortly after women were granted the vote in the UK (1918), after an arduous campaign by the suffragettes. This first feminist wave, associated with the political women’s suffrage movement, did not prompt historians to investigate women’s history with a few exceptions.

What are Secrets of Women?

juliamartins99Key Concepts

Throughout history, the womb was often thought to be a mysterious organ, which could make women ill yet create new life. Knowledge about women’s bodies and especially reproduction was thought to be hidden in the womb, ‘secret’ from prying eyes.