Anita Hoffmann
Research
Research
This project aims to increase the understanding of how ‘middling sorts’ of individuals in seventeenth-century London and England managed diseases and ailments they might have wished to keep private. People were rarely alone, and privacy was often associated with disrepute, secrecy, conspiracy, and subversion.
The project aims to answer the following three questions through mainly empirical research of original sources: What were afflictions that contemporaries considered needing privacy; how did sufferers approach the management or cure of such conditions; and what solutions were available to them? These sources could be diaries, correspondence, family recipe-books, popular medical literature, newsbooks, periodicals, almanacs, handbills, practitioners’ and apothecaries’ casebooks and accounts, and contemporary popular literature.
Papers and publications
Papers and publications
- 'The birth of proprietary medicine advertising and bookseller vendor networks c.1630-1670', Literature, Medicine and Science: an interdisciplinary conference, Birkbeck (October 2022).
