Place, health, and disease: The Airs, Waters, Places tradition in early modern England and North America

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Volumn 38, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 443-465

  Wear, Andrew ^a  

^a WELLCOME TRUST SANGER INSTITUTE   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67650086686     PISSN: 10829636     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10829636-2008-003     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. Hippocrates, "Prognosis," in Hippocratic Writings, ed. G. E. R. Lloyd (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican Books, 1978), 171
2. For the Greek text and an authoritative introduction, see Jacques Jouanna, ed., Hippocrate, Tome 2, 2e Partie: Airs, eaux, lieux (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1996)
3. Hippocrates, "Airs, Waters, Places," in Hippocratic Writings, ed. Lloyd, 168; further citations are given parenthetically in the text
4. For a well-balanced discussion of "Europeans" and "Asians" in the treatise, see Rosalind Thomas, Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science, and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86-97
5. See, for many examples, V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European Attitudes towards the Outside World in the Imperial Age (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969)
6. The classic account of the relationship between climate, geography, and peoples is Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967)
7. Fynes Moryson, An itinerary containing his ten yeeres travell..., 4 vols. (1617; repr. Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1907), 2:69; further citations are given parenthetically in the text
8. For the role of personal observation in anatomy, see Andrew Wear, "William Harvey and the 'Way of the Anatomists,'" History of Science 21 (1983): 223-49
9. More generally for science, see Stephen Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985)
10. For the spread of "matters of fact," see Barbara J. Schapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000). On the trustworthiness of travelers' reports, see for instance, the puritan minister Francis Higginson, who writes of his account of New England: "I have been careful to report nothing of New England but what I have partly seen with my own eyes and partly heard and inquired from the mouths of very honest and religious person[s] who by living in the country a good space of time have had experience and knowledge of the state thereof and whose testimonies I do believe as myself. "
11. Francis Higginson, "To his Friends at Leicester September 1629," in Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629-1638 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 30. The letter was published in 1630 as "New Englands Plantation. Or, A Short Description of the Commodities and Discommodities of that Countrey."
12. See Andrew Wear, "Making Sense of Health and the Environment in Early Modern England," in Medicine in Society: Historical Essays, ed. Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 126-47
13. and more generally and also for the demographic element, see Mary Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
14. See, for instance, William Bullein, The Government of Health (London, 1558), fol. 30r
15. Tobias Venner, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam: Or, A Plaine Philosophicall Demonstration of the Nature, Faculties and Effects of all such Things as ... Make for the Preservation of Health (1620; London, 1628), 1-2, 8
16. Bengt Knuttson, A Litil Boke ... for the ... Pestilence (London, 1485?), fol. 2r-v
17. Stephen Bradwell, A Watch-Man for the Pest (London, 1625), 4
18. William Boghurst, Loimographia: An Account of the Great Plague of London in the Year 1665, ed. J. F. Payne (London, 1894), 17-18
19. and see also Charles Creighton, A History of Epidemics in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891), 324, 327-28. Several modern historians of plague have followed Creighton in emphasizing the role of sewers, stagnant water, dirt, etc., in the understanding of plague
20. See, for instance, Nathaniel Carpenter, Geography, Delineated Forth in Two Bookes. Containing the Sphaericall and Topicall Parts Thereof (Oxford, 1625), 1-4. Ptolemy believed, wrote Carpenter, "that the Chorographer separately handleth the lesser parts and matters of smaller momement such as are hillocks, brookes, lakes, townes, villages and Parishes, without any respect at all to the places adjoining, as conferring them with the Sphericall fabrick of the whole Earth." Chorography focused, as Arthur Hopton put it in his Speculum Topographicum (London, 1611), "on any particular place without relation unto the whole ... as ports, villages, rivers not omitting the smallest: also to describe the platforme [plan] of houses, buildings, monuments, or any such particular thing" (fol. B1r)
21. Moryson, Itinerary, 2:192
22. William Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent (1576; London, 1596), 200-201
23. partly cited in Wear, "Making Sense of Health and the Environment," in Medicine in Society, ed. Wear, 133
24. Lambarde, Perambulation, 201
25. William Camden, Camden's Britannia, Newly Translated into English ... by Edmund Gibson (1586; London, 1695), 342
26. Camden, Britannia, ii. Gibson in a footnote observed that "Later discoveries have better defined the site of Britain" (ii, note C)
27. William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library and Dover Publications, 1994), 444-45
28. in David Ross, ed., The Works of Aristotle, vol. 7, trans. E. S. Forster (1927; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)
29. Richard Trappes-Lomas, ed., The Diary and Letter Book of the Rev. Thomas Brockbank, 1671-1709 (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1930), 25, 235 (common abbreviations have been spelled out)
30. Thomas Wright, ed., The Autobiography of J. L. (London, 1844), 44
31. See John Graunt, Naturall and Political Observations ... Upon the Bills of Mortality (1662; London, 1676), 57-64
32. R. Finlay, Population and Metropolis: The Demography of London, 1580-1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
33. William T. Davis, ed., Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, 1606-1646 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1982), 47; further citations are given parenthetically in the text
34. Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New-found Land of Virginia (London, 1588), sig. F3r, and cited again below in the text. On those who "slaundered the countrie itself," see sig. A4r-v
35. See, for instance, Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus posthumus, or, Purchas his Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (1625; repr. Glasgow: James MacLehose, 1905), 1:xl-xliii: "What a World of Travellers have by their own eyes observed.... Here therefore the various Nations, Persons ... Merchandises ... and other remarkable Varieties of Men and humane Affaires are by eye-witnesses related more amply and certainly than any collector ever hath done ... and thus we have showed the scope of the Author and profitable use of the worke for the subject, and a World of Witness for the Evidence."
36. On the rise of a skeptical approach to fabulous and marvelous medieval travelers' tales, see Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 1400-1600 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988)
37. Francis Higginson, "To his Friends at Leicester September 1629," in Letters from New England, ed. Emerson, 34
38. Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation, 47
39. A full version of the doctrine was set out by John Winthrop, "General Observations for the Plantation of New England" and "Reasons to be Considered and Objections with Answers," in Winthrop Papers, Volume 2: 1623-1630, ed. Stewart Mitchell (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931), 113, 140-41
40. Thomas Graves, "Letter, September 1629," in Letters from New England, ed. Emerson, 39-40
41. Labor or exercise was long prescribed as a common cure for scurvy; see Kenneth J. Carpenter, The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 13, 46, 60, 68, 138
42. Thomas Dudley "to the Lady Bridget, Countess of Lincoln March 12 and 28, 1630/1" (Letters from New England, ed. Emerson, 75)
43. Allyn Bailey Forbes, ed., Winthrop Papers, Volume 3: 1631-1637 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943), 20
44. Mitchell, ed., Winthrop Papers, 2:324; see also the letter from John Humfrey to Winthrop (333)
45. William Strachy, "A True Reportorie," in Purchas, Hakluytus postumus, 19:58-59
46. See Karen Kupperman, "Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Experience," William and Mary Quaterly 41 (1984): 213-40
47. Dobson, Contours of Death and Disease. By the early eighteenth century, the quantification of the Airs, Waters, Places tradition was under way. Places, seasons, years, and climates were related to illnesses, epidemics, and mortality
48. See, for instance, Thomas Short, New Observations on City, Town and Country Bills of Mortality (London, 1750)
49. Short, A Comparative History of the Increase and Decrease of Mankind in England and Severall Countries Abroad ... To which is Added, a Syllabus of the General states of Health, Air, Seasons, and Food for the Last Three Hundred Years; and also a Meteorological Discourse (London, 1767)
50. John Huxham, Observations on the air and epidemic diseases from the year 1728 to 1737 inclusive (London, 1759)
51. and Huxham, Observations on the air, and epidemic diseases, from the beginning of the year 1738, to the end of the year 1748 (London, 1767)
52. See also, Andrea A. Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
53. Gervase Markham, Cheape and Good Husbandry For the Well-Ordering of all Beasts, and Fowles, and for the generall Cure of their Diseases (London, 1614), 64
54. John Norden, The Surveiors Dialogue (London, 1610), 165; further citations are given in the text
55. John Donne, "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions," in John Donne Dean of St. Paul's: Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. John Hayward (London: Nonesuch Press, 1962), 548-49