Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England by Olivia Weisser (review)

In the opening vignette of Ill Composed, Alice Thornton had a literal case of cold feet on her wedding day in 1651. Falling “suddenly, dreadfully, ill” with continuous headaches, stomachaches, vomiting, and sickness of the heart, Thornton traced the cause of her illness to her ill-timed feet washing in preparation for the wedding. Thornton called the episode “a sad omen to my future comfort” (p. 1). As illustrated by this opening example, Ill Composed transports readers to the inner worlds of seventeenth-century English men and women and introduces us to the rich and colorful ways in which the historical actors understood sickness experiences.

In her introduction, Olivia Weisser writes, “stories of sickness matter because patients played important roles in defining medical care in the early modern period . . . [the] voices and choices of ordinary patients were integral to [the] structuring [of] medical practice” (p. 2). While the patient has been the focus of scholars such as Nicholas Jewson, Roy Porter, Barbara Duden, and others, Weisser’s book extends our current historiography in important ways. First, Weisser contends that our historical actors’ experiences of illness were culturally framed and that the “multiple influences shaping patients’ perceptions were mediated by a significant, often overlooked factor: gender” (p. 2). Men and women reacted to ill health, endured their ailments, and communicated their sickness experiences in different ways. Emphasizing that the distinctions outlined in the book fall along a “spectrum of difference” rather than “any strict male–female gender binary” (p. 3), Weisser’s arguments are nuanced and sophisticated. The book demonstrates that early modern women tended to observe others’ sickness experiences as models to evaluate and describe their own illness. They were more likely to connect their sickness with emotional turmoil and traumatic events and were more attuned to the social aspects of illness in form of sickbed visits. Early modern men, on the other hand, generally privileged their own bodily experiences to articulate ill health and focused on physiological explanation for sickness. Gender, Weisser argues, also colored how patients suffered and communicated pain and how they took on the sick role. Many factors contribute to these gendered narratives; Weisser contends that “prevailing medical frameworks, belief systems, economic conditions, and gender norms dictate the ways we interpret and even physically feel our bodies” (p. 15).

Second, as suggested by the title, practices of writing and communication receive thoughtful consideration in this work. Ill Composed draws upon a wide range of “ego literature” as its main body of evidence. For Weisser, this comprises a range of different writing genres. Forty diaries, fifty caches of correspondence penned by elite English men and women, and nearly 650 petitions for parish relief by the sick poor across England from 1623 to 1730 form the basis of this study. Weisser brings the rich sickness narratives of early modern men and women to light and offers a detailed and subtle analysis. By adopting the term “ego literature,” Weisser highlights not only the wide variety of writings offering sickness narratives, but also that each of these overlapping genres was governed by distinct sets of conventions, rules, styles, and ways of address that mediate the recounting of sickness experiences. Early modern writers had to “learn” to be sick to acquire a vocabulary to express their illness experiences, and ideas about the body. This language of illness is grounded in daily life and, particularly, in stories. Three kinds of stories are explored in depth—“stories of sickness about others, patients’ own past experiences, and stories in devotional literature and practices” (p. 48). Weisser reminds us that “personal” writings were often shared and passed among family and friends and served as an outlet for constructing self-identities. Contemporary writing practices, Weisser demonstrates, crucially shaped how writers articulate their states of health; their reactions to sickness and the role ill health might have played in their quotidian lives.

Ill Composed closes by looking...