Olivia Weisser, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. ix, 281, $85.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0300200706.

Perho, Irmeli. Catalogue of Persian Manuscripts: Codices Persici, Codices Eyseriani, Codex Persicus Add. Copenhagen: NIAS Press and Det Kongelige Bibliotek, 2017. Hardback, pp. 706. ISBN: 978-87-7694-216-8.

Sandra Cavallo and  Tessa Storey (eds), Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture: Bodies and Environments in Italy and England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. xvi, 328, £70.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-5261-1347-4.

Books also Received

Sandra Cavallo, Artisans of the body in early modern Italy: identities, families and masculinities, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2007, pp. xii, 281, £60.00 (hardback 978-0-7190-7662-6). David PCline,Creating choice: a community responds to the need for abortion and birth control, 1961–1973, Palgrave Studies in Oral History, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. xiv...

Theodore Jun Yoo, It's Madness: The Politics of Mental Health in Colonial Korea (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016), pp. 248, hardback, ISBN: 9780520289307.

For example, women’s illness generally had a pattern of a sudden and traumatic onset followed by long periods confined to bed. Their narratives and symptoms were influenced by what they learnt of the experiences of others from consulting books, receiving letters or talking with family and friends. Bedridden women fretted over who chose to visit them and how comforting such visitors were, thus d...

Paul David Blanc, Fake Silk: The Lethal History of Viscose Rayon (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. xiv + 309, $40.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-300-20466-7.

risked less than whites would have done, because they were presumed to have superior resistance to yellow fever. The absence of this racialised set of ideas within Apel’s analysis is a significant omission. How enlightened were the early Republic’s medical cognoscenti, after all, if they continued to reinforce racist prejudice that black bodies were unfailingly strong rather than subject, equal...