An Eighteenth-Century Love Story
The Newdigate family became Hans Sloane’s patients around 1701, starting with Lady Frances Sedley (née Newdigate), her husband, and father-in-law. By 1705-6, Sloane was treating Elizabeth Newdigate (b....
View ArticleNursing Fathers, Slacking Dads and False Assumptions
Things I learned on the weekend… Slacker dads watch sports instead of read their children stories. They avoid housework and childcare as much as possible. They prefer work-life to domesticity. And...
View ArticleLooking after your family until the end: the cost of caregiving in historical...
Another day, another governmental exhortation that families just aren’t doing enough to keep society going… This time, it is Simon Hughes (the UK coalition’s justice minister) who suggested that...
View ArticleThe Tale of Jane Wenham: an Eighteenth-century Hertfordshire Witch?
The Story The tale of Jane Wenham, found guilty of witchcraft in 1712, begins as all early modern witch stories do: with a suspicion.[1] A local farmer, John Chapman had long attributed the strange...
View ArticleLooking to the Edge, or Networking Early Modern Women
It all started when someone noticed a blog post on Anglo-Saxonist Allen J Frantzen's website titled "How to Fight Your Way Out of a Feminist Fog"...
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Choosing the Countryside: Women, Health and Power in the Eighteenth Century
To honour International Women’s Day today, I have decided to return to my roots as a women’s historian. I first became a historian for feminist reasons: to recover women’s past and to understand the...
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An Unusual Case of Menstruation in Eighteenth-Century England
“Mrs Wilson’s Case”, undated and unsigned, appears in the final volume of Hans Sloane’s Medical Correspondence and Cases (Sloane MS 4078, f. 372). Mrs Wilson’s troubles began the previous spring. She...
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Doctor Sloane and His Patients in Eighteenth-Century England
In April, I received the good news that the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada had decided to fund my project “Reconstructing the Lives of Doctor Sloane and His Patients in...
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Sloane: Part of the Family
By Alice Marples When thinking about famous figures in the history of science, it can sometimes be easy to forget that they were not working in isolation. A lot of recent research has focused on...
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A Horrifying Pregnancy and Cesarean Operation in Eighteenth-Century Ireland
A surgeon performing a Caesarean operation on an agonized woman who had apparently been carrying a dead baby in her womb for five years. (Reproduction, 1933, of a woodcut, 1560.) Credit: Wellcome...
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