Thomas Phaer and “The Boke of Chyldren” (1544) ed. by Rick Bowers (review)

ESC 27, 2001 Rick Bowers, ed. Thomas Phaer and “The Boke of Chyldren” (1544)• Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 201. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999. $100.00 (U.S.). This little book of precisely 100 pages is a gem of its kind, the first in the 200s of the commendable series shepherded through its first 150 titles by Mario Di Cesare at SUNY Binghamton. It is an old-spelling edition of Phaer’s manual in pediatrics, with glosses, a list of authors cited or mentioned, and a bibliography, edited from the only surviving copy of the 1544 edition-now in The Huntington Library. In the compact, well-informed, and accessibly written twenty-four page introduction, Bowers cov­ ers a multitude of topics from Phaer’s life and literary pas­ times to the origins and history of the text presented here, its audience and intended uses, its covert polemics regarding the use of the vernacular, and a good deal more about such practical books in an emerging print culture. The work, by its very appearance, says something about the status of children in sixteenth-century England, about the democratization and de­ mystification of learning, about childhood diseases as they were then understood, and about the clinical dimensions of caring for children. Bowers also makes the de rigueur detour into matters of sex, gender, power, and hints of male control over the bodies of children, mothers, and nurses that are ostensibly implicit in this text, but in this he is overly cautious. That Phaer dissuades nurses from using hemlock plasters was for him no greater an interference in the lives of women than discouraging the use of thalidomide or glue sniffing in pregnant women today; ac­ cording to his understanding of the properties of hemlock, such practices would cause sterility in the child in later years. This may be seen now as patriarchal control, but his mission was to improve health care for women and children, not only as a writer, but also as a practicing physician and legislative repre­ sentative. Phaer’s literary ties are much stronger in other books, such as his accomplished translation of the first nine books of the Aeneid. And yet we humanists will be dabbling with etiquette books, sermons, educational manuals, medical treatises, recu­ sant tracts, diaries, and even household “how to” books from 208 REVIEWS cooking to obstetrics — all deemed of value as samplings of prose, curiosities, markers of mentalities, histories of ideas, ges­ tures of influence, in short, as tools in the contextualizing of culture. These are loci, as well, for the application of skills in the editing of early texts. They tell us something about the dissemination of practical information, about social conscience, and about the thinking habits of the medical philosopher even in a popularizing mode. But it must be said that this work is far closer to Marinelli’s Le medicine partenenti alle infermità della donne, Mercado’s De morbis muliebribus liber, Spachias’s Gynaeciorum, and Liébault’s Trois livres appartenans aux infirmitez et maladies des femmes (all of which, as I recall, cover aspects o f post-parturition, nursing, and the diseases of chil­ dren) than it is to Elyot’s Book Named the Governor. A topic much on Phaer’s mind, for example, was the qual­ ity o f milk for nursing babies and its influence upon the child’s future health, conduct, and intelligence — for the belief was widely held among physicians that milk was nearly equivalent in importance to the seed of the parents in determining the tem­ perament of the offspring. Following arguments popularized by Aulus Gellius in Attic Nights (Bk. xil, eh. 1) and taken up by Guarino of Favora, Renaissance medical writers debated the malign influences of nurses of inferior physical and mental her­ itages. Guarino’s advice to employ only the natural mother or persons o f quality was a front-runner issue; it turns up in Novel 23 of Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure in the 1560s. Phaer not only seconds this advice but also offers recipes for the improve­ ment of breast milk at the same time as he spells out precisely which diseases in...