Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England

Bringing together her key studies of health, medicine and poverty in Tudor and Stuart England (a number published here for the first time, and the whole presented with a substantial introduction and commentary), Margaret Pelling makes a welcome contribution. Here, the findings of the medical historian are put at the service of social history - to help answer the questions of social historians, to enrich their outlook and understanding, and to be made accessible to a wider audience. Her essays show that - then as now - health, sickness and medical care were everyday obsessions of ordinary people in the Tudor and Stuart era. These preoccupations are reflected in the regulation of the urban environment, in satire and vernacular literature, in attitudes to sexuality and to diet, in occupational structures - indeed in almost every aspect of the period.