Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (review)

For the past few decades, the history of the book has been a growth industry for early-modernists. Elizabeth Furdell brings some of this rich scholarship to bear upon medical books. Unfortunately, scholars in the field will know much of this material already, and for those new to the area, Furdell is an unreliable guide. She presents a patchwork of information drawn largely from secondary sources. For example, on pp. 41-48, she tells the stories of a series of publishers, drawn from the work of other historians (here in parentheses): John Streater (Adrian Johns), the publishers of Nicholas Culpeper (Mary Rhinelander McCarl), Moses Pitt (Leona Rostenberg), and George Strawbridge (Giles Mandelbrote). These are all good historians; the problem is that Furdell does not add anything to their accounts. She oversimplifies Johns's account of Streater, for she repeatedly asserts that publishers were driven by their search for profit and cannot be easily categorized politically (pp. 49, 73, 91)—exactly the opposite of Johns's reading of Streater's politics.

In other cases, Furdell's borrowings are a bit more substantial than her footnotes suggest. In her discussion of medical portraiture, she cites Ludmilla Jordanova's Defining Features, a landmark work that accompanied an exhibit of medical and scientific portraits at London's National Portrait Gallery.¹ All four of the images that Furdell reproduces in this section are in Jordanova's book: one is reproduced courtesy of Jordanova herself; another two are reproduced courtesy of the same institutions that Jordanova credits; and the fourth, like most of the rest of the book's illustrations, has no illustration credit at all. In other words, a substantial portion of this section, in concept and in specific illustrations, comes from Jordanova.

While Furdell relies upon secondary sources, she overlooks some crucial works. To give just one example, in her discussion of midwives on pp. 93-95 she does not cite Hilary Marland's groundbreaking collection, nor Adrian Wilson's Making of Man-Midwifery, nor Doreen Evenden's work on seventeenth-century London midwives.² Such omissions lead to curious statements; for example: "Except during the Interregnum, Church authorities controlled midwifery" (p. 94). Historians have suggested that while some midwives did take out bishops' licenses (the only available formal authorization to practice), many, perhaps even most, did not do so. What controlled midwives, if anything, was community norms and gossip.

Furdell commits a sin that we warn undergraduates against: she repeatedly cites primary sources as they are quoted in secondary sources. Sometimes this practice leads to errors. Furdell misquotes a 1677 work by Turquet de Mayerne because she relies on a popular 1997 book in which "scabrous" was a typo for the plant "scabious."

Furdell presents figures on medical publishing in England, footnoting Andrew Wear's magisterial Knowledge and Practice.³ But her numbers are not up-to-date: although citations to previously unrecorded books are being added constantly to the on-line English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), Furdell relies upon Wear's citation of Paul Slack's germinal article of 1979 (an item absent from her own bibliography, although cited elsewhere in her notes).⁴ ESTC lists hundreds of additional medical books not known to Slack. Were medical publishing a minor aspect of her work, I would understand Furdell's reliance upon a twenty-five-year-old article. But since medical publishing is the topic of her entire book, she should provide us with up-to-date numbers that describe the contours of the print marketplace of medicine. Furdell notes that she has identified two hundred publishers of medical books in early modern England, but we never hear anything more about how she characterizes this group. Were they the ones printing Bibles and other big-ticket items? Ballad Partners, specialists in cheap print? Respected office-holders in the Stationers' Company (the guild that monopolized the print trades)?

Many minor errors plague this book. For example, irregular practitioners...