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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
In early modern England the place where most people experienced and treated illness was the home. Medical practices were therefore invariably centred on the family, and in many cases, sufferers diagnosed and nursed their ailments without seeking advice from a practitioner, instead favouring the counsel of a family member or friend. Centred on the personal transactions between patients, kin, neighbours, and in some cases a practitioner, how might the religiously plural context of the Reformation era have shaped these close social relationships? The subjects of this study belonged to two Catholic families: Nicholas Blundell (1669–1737) of Little Crosby in Lancashire, and Catharine Burton (1668–1714) of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Focusing on the sickness experiences, lay healing practices and medical treatment described at length in their diaries, this essay asks three central questions. First, in what ways did confessionally opposed families integrate or separate from one another in relation to matters of health? Second, did these subjects forge more exclusive ties with medical practitioners of their own confession, or, conversely, did they find a way to coexist comfortably with, and interact in, the ‘medical marketplace’? Third, by examining the practices through which religion and medicine interrelated within the household, I aim to challenge longstanding assumptions concerning the progressive ‘secularization’ or ‘medicalization’ of the sickbed. I hope to shed fresh light on the ways in which medical practices were embedded in social relations and community experiences; and to begin to unravel some of the complex channels through which confessional identity was experienced and expressed in relation to healing.
1 Wear, Andrew, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine 1550-1680 (Cambridge, 2000), 24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 Lindemann, Mary, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 2010), 241–2.Google Scholar
3 This essay, and the case studies it presents, form part of my doctoral work on ‘Religion, Medicine and Confessional Identity in Early Modern England’, which offers a broader, multi-confessional exploration of the relationship between religion and medicine in daily life and practice.
4 On the concept of the ‘medical marketplace’, see Jenner, Mark and Wallis, Patrick, eds, Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonics 1450-1850 (Basingstoke, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 Recent work tracking these processes includes Macdonald, Michael. ‘The Medicalization of Suicide in England: Laymen, Physicians and Cultural Change, 1500-1870’, Milbank Quarterly 67 (1989), 69–91 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Wear, Andrew, ed., Medicine in Society: Historical Essays (Cambridge, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Webster, Charles, ‘Paracelsus Confronts the Saints: Miracles, Healing and the Secularization of Magic’, Social History of Medicine 8 (1995), 403–21 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Porter, Roy, ‘The Hour of Philip Aries’, Mortality 4 (1999), 83–90 Google Scholar; van Teijlingen, Edwin R, et al., Midwifery and the Medicalization of Childbirth (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Mortimer, Ian, The Dying and the Doctors: The Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England (Woodbridge, 2009).Google Scholar
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7 ODNB, s.n. ‘Burton, Catharine’, online at: <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4122=, accessed June 2012.
8 Jenner and Wallis, Medicine, 2.
9 On the relationship between medical discourse and medical practice see, for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Loetz, Francisca, ‘Why Change Habits? Early Modern Medical Innovation between Medicalization and Medical Culture’, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2010), 453–74.Google Scholar
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11 On the need to explore this issue further, see Walsham, Alexandra, ‘In Sickness and in Health: Medicine and Inter-Confessional Relations in Post-Reformation England’, in Scott Dixon, C., Freist, Dagmar and Greengrass, Mark, eds, Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe (Farnham, 2009), 161–83 Google Scholar. Francisca Loetz has also encouraged us to think about how individuals gave confessional shape to their daily lives; see her ‘Bridging the Gap: Confessionalization in Switzerland’, in Holenstein, André, Maissen, Thomas and Prak, Maarten, eds, The Republican Alternative: The Netherlands and Switzerland Compared (Amsterdam, 2008), 75–98.Google Scholar
12 Wear, ‘Religious Beliefs’.
13 Houlbrooke, Ralph, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1450-1750 (Oxford, 1998), 148–9.Google Scholar
14 Wear, ‘Religious Beliefs’.
15 The humoral system of medicine remained the dominant conceptual model well into the eighteenth century. Physiologically, it was based on the four humours – black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm – and illness arose from their imbalance. Moderation in the use of the six non-naturals was believed to support a healthy humoral equilibrium: Lindemann, Medicine, 240-2.
16 Wear, Knowledge, 49-103; Leong, ‘Making Medicines’, 145-68.
17 Wear, Knowledge, 21-4, 49-55, 227.
18 Leong, Elaine and Pennell, Sarah, ‘Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern “Medical Marketplace”’, in Jenner, and Wallis, , eds, Medicine, 133–52.Google ScholarPubMed
19 The Great Diurnal of Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, 2: 1712-1719, ed. Frank Tyrer and J. J. Bagley (Manchester, 1970), 146.
20 The Great Diurnal of Nicholas Blundell of Little Crosby, 1:1702-1711, ed. Frank Tyrer and J.J. Bagley (Manchester, 1968), 188, 190, 191; ibid. 2: 3, 277, 53 respectively.
21 Ibid. 1:282, 165 respectively.
22 See Gibson, T. E., ed., A Cavalier’s Note Book: Notes, Anecdotes and Observations of William Blundell of Crosby, Lancashire (London, 1880).Google Scholar
23 Great Diurnal, ed. Tyrer and Bagley, 2: 137, 233.
24 Ibid. 45. A ‘glister’ or ‘clyster’ was an enema or suppository.
25 Ibid. 277.
26 Ibid. 1: 152.
27 Ibid. 2: 34.
28 Ibid. 135.
29 Gibson, ed., Cavalier’s Notebook, 193.
30 Hunter, Thomas, An English Carmelite: The Life of Catharine Burton, Mother Mary Xaveria of the Angels … Collected from her own Writings (London, 1876), 5.Google Scholar
31 Ibid. 5-61
32 Ibid. 43, 63.
33 Ibid. 64-5.
34 Ibid. 68.
35 Ibid. 80.
36 Ibid. 82.
37 Ibid. 83.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid. 84-5.
40 Ibid. 86-7.
41 Great Diurnal, ed. Tyrer and Bagley, 1: 51.
42 Ibid. 52.
43 Ibid. 59.
44 Ibid. 64.
45 Treatment by Dr Lancaster is noted frequently: ibid. 1: 64, 96-8, 124; 2: 1-15, 60-2, 64, 69, 75, 82, 114, 124, 127, 135, 148-50, 242.
46 Ibid. 2: 12; 1: 28, 124.
47 Ibid. 2: 148-9.
48 Ibid. 150.
49 Wear, ‘Religious Beliefs’, 154.
50 Henry, ‘Souls’, 89.
51 Porter, ‘The Hour’, 83-90.
52 Mortimer, The Dying.
53 Great Diurnal, ed. Tyrer and Bagley, 1: 241.
54 Ibid. 241-2.
55 Ibid. 12.
56 Ibid. 65.
57 Ibid. 87-8.
58 Ibid. 37-8.
59 Ibid. 49.
60 Glanvill, Joseph, Catholick Charity Recommended in a Sermon (London, 1669), 5–6.Google Scholar
61 Edmund Gayton, The Religion of a Physician (London, 1663), B1–B3.