Cholera. The American scientific experience 1947–80

parents in Tudor and Stuart times, and Antonia Fraser, in her The weaker vessel (Weidenfeld, 1983) tells numerous stories of passionate marriages. The Stonian interpretation has now been reinforced by Miriam Slater's anatomy of a seventeenth-century gentry family, the Verneys. Slater's is a bleak view indeed. She does not see the Verney family in the Stuart age as a "human socializing and nurturing agency devoted to the emotional and psychological welfare of its members" (p.144) but rather as an instrument of "social control". She stresses the tyrannical power exercised by the family head, Sir Ralph; and shows how practically all Verney marriages were not merely arranged for financial advantage but were emotional failures. Slater regards the Verneys as typical of their age (this was "family life in the seventeenth century"), but the inference may be dubious. Much of her evidence comes from the Civil War period, during which the Verney family was thrown into deep chaos by the death in battle of the family head Sir Edmund, the premature elevation of his son, Ralph, and constant major threats to the Verney estates. Emergency retrenchment measures at a time of Civil War must not be confused with the practices of routine, peacetime family strategies. Altogether a sunnier picture of the early modern family emerges from Steven Ozment's investigation of sermons and advice manuals instructing family members on their duties and on the upbringing of children. These works-and Ozment's sample is mainly German, and mainly Lutheran-advocate love, care, responsibilities, and moderation. The wishes of wives are to be respected, and children are to be disciplined by example not by the rod. Ozment optimistically concludes that these tracts mirrored or shaped reality. A cynic might suggest that they instead indicate that the real world of the Reformation family was indeed as harsh as Stone has painted it. Ozment's book is of direct interest to the medical historian, because his chapter on childbirth contains admirable summaries of midwifery and infant-rearing treatises of the sixteenth century, in particular Eucharius Rosslin's Rosengarten (1513) and Johann Coler's Haus-Buch (1591). It is noteworthy-though it may not be significant-that the earlier, Catholic Rosslin is markedly more "scientific", more "enlightened", more "forward-looking" than the later, Protestant Coler. Rosslin showed immense concern for the well-being of the pregnant mother, and required gentleness of the midwife. He urged mothers to nurse their own babies. Coler, by contrast, retailed gross superstitions (an eclipse at the hour of birth spelt death to both mother and child) and dabbled in therapeutic magic (removing a dead foetus from the womb would be helped by draping a snakeskin over the mother). Medical historians will also be glad of Ozment's survey of the autobiographical writings of Hermann von Weinsberg, born in 1518. His youth was attended by all the horrors of infant mortality (all his sisters died). He himself suffered numerous near-fatal diseases, such as measles; he also suffered equally terrifying cures (for a nosebleed he was "hung somewhat by the neck"). His childhood was dogged with perennial ill health, notably by worms and ineradicable infestations of lice. Battle will doubtless continue to rage over the health and happiness of families. These useful case studies tend to suggest that while the material conditions of life were appalling, personal relations may not have been so harsh and mercenary as they have been painted.