In 1705-1706, during the War of the Spanish Succession and two years after a devastating earthquake, an ’epidemic’ of mysterious sudden deaths terrorized Rome. In early modern society, a sudden death was perceived as a mala mors because it threatened the victim’s salvation by hindering repentance and last confession. Special masses were celebrated to implore God’s clemency and Pope Clement XI ordered his personal physician, Giovanni Maria Lancisi, to perform a series of dissections in the university anatomical theatre in order to discover the 'true causes' of the deadly events. It was the first investigation of this kind ever to take place for a condition which was not contagious. The book that Lancisi published on this topic, De subitaneis mortibus (’On Sudden Deaths’, 1707), is one of the earliest modern scientific investigations of death; it was not only an accomplished example of mechanical philosophy as applied to the life sciences in eighteenth-century Europe, but also heralded a new pathological anatomy (traditionally associated with Giambattista Morgagni). Moreover, Lancisi’s tract and the whole affair of the sudden deaths in Rome marked a significant break in the traditional attitude towards dying, introducing a more active approach that would later develop into the practice of resuscitation medicine. Sudden Death explores how a new scientific interpretation of death and a new attitude towards dying first came into being, breaking free from the Hippocratic tradition, which regarded death as the obvious limit of physician’s capacity, and leading the way to a belief in the 'conquest of death' by medicine which remains in force to this day.

This collection examines different aspects of attitudes towards disease and death in writing of the long eighteenth century. Taking three conditions as examples – ennui, sexual diseases and infectious diseases – as well as death itself, contributors explore the ways in which writing of the period placed them within a borderland between fashionability and unfashionability, relating them to current social fashions and trends. These essays also look at ways in which diseases were fashioned into bearing cultural, moral, religious and even political meaning. Works of literature are used as evidence, but also medical writings, personal correspondence and diaries. Diseases or conditions subject to scrutiny include syphilis, male impotence, plague, smallpox and consumption. Death, finally, is looked at both in terms of writers constructing meanings within death and of the fashioning of posthumous reputation.

In recent decades, researchers have studied the cultures of medicine and the ways in which context and identity shape both individual experiences and structural barriers in medical education. The essays in this collection offer new insights into the deep histories of these processes, across time and around the globe. Transforming Medical Education compiles twenty-one historical case studies that foreground processes of learning, teaching, and defining medical communities in educational contexts. The chapters are organized around the themes of knowledge transmission, social justice, identity, pedagogy, and the surprising affinities between medical and historical practice. By juxtaposing original research on diverse geographies and eras – from medieval Japan to twentieth-century Canada, and from colonial Cameroon to early Republican China – the volume disrupts traditional historiographies of medical education by making room for schools of medicine for revolutionaries, digital cadavers, emotional medical students, and the world’s first mandatory Indigenous community placement in an accredited medical curriculum. This unique collection of international scholarship honours historian, physician, and professor Jacalyn Duffin for her outstanding contributions to the history of medicine and medical education. An invaluable scholarly resource and teaching tool, Transforming Medical Education offers a provocative study of what it means to teach, learn, and belong in medicine.

Malleable Anatomies offers an account of the early stages of the practice of anatomical modelling in mid-eighteenth-century Italy. It investigates the 'mania' for anatomical displays that swept the Italian peninsula, and traces the fashioning of anatomical models as important social, cultural, and political as well as medical tools. Over the course of the eighteenth century, anatomical specimens offered particularly accurate insights into the inner body. Being coloured, soft, malleable, and often life-size, they promised to foster anatomical knowledge for different audiences in a delightful way. But how did anatomical models and preparations inscribe and mediate bodily knowledge? How did they change the way in which anatomical knowledge was created and communicated? And how did they affect the lives of those involved in their production, display, viewing, and handling? Examining the circumstances surrounding the creation and early viewing of anatomical displays in Bologna and Naples, Malleable Anatomies addresses these questions by reconstructing how anatomical modelling developed at the intersection of medical discourse, religious ritual, antiquarian and artistic cultures, and Grand Tour display. While doing so, it investigates the development of anatomical modelling in the context of the diverse worlds of visual and material practices that characterized the representation and display of the body in mid-eighteenth-century Italy. Drawing attention to the artisanal dimension of anatomical practice, and to the role of women as both makers and users of anatomical models, it considers how anatomical specimens lay at the centre of a composite world of social interactions, which led to the fashioning of modellers as anatomical celebrities. Moreover, it examines how anatomical displays transformed the proverbially gruesome practice of anatomy into an enthralling experience that engaged audiences' senses.

Medicine and the Inquisition offers a wide-ranging and nuanced account of the role played by the Roman, Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in shaping medical learning and practice in the period from 1500 to 1850. Until now, learned medicine has remained a secondary subject in scholarship on Inquisitions. This volume delves into physicians’ contributions to the inquisitorial machinery as well as the persecution of medical practitioners and the censorship of books of medicine. Although they are commonly depicted as all-pervasive systems of repression, the Inquisitions emerge from these essays as complex institutions. Authors investigate how boundaries between the medical and the religious were negotiated and transgressed in different contexts. The book sheds new light on the intellectual and social world of early modern physicians, paying particular attention to how they complied with, and at times undermined, ecclesiastical control and the hierarchies of power in which the medical profession was embedded. Contributors are Hervé Baudry, Bradford A. Bouley, Alessandra Celati, Maria Pia Donato, Martha Few, Guido M. Giglioni, Andrew Keitt, Hannah Marcus, and Timothy D. Walker. This volume includes the articles originally published in Volume XXIII, Nos. 1-2 (2018) of Brill's journal Early Science and Medicine with one additional chapter by Timothy D. Walker and an updated introduction.

Sleep Paralysis: Historical, Psychological, and Medical Perspectives offers the first comprehensive examination of sleep paralysis from both clinical and cultural perspectives. Dr. Brian Sharpless and Dr. Karl Doghramji provide a thorough and easily readable resource on the phenomenon and present differential diagnosis suggestions, medication guidance, and a new treatment approach for mental health professionals.

For seasoned professionals as well as students, A History of Public Health is visionary and essential reading.