Right Living

Popular health texts illuminate the practice of medicine itself and the experiences of sickness, birth, and death... Such texts provide useful insight into worldview as well as bedside practice. Popular guides to health were-and still are-relevant to historians seeking to understand the changing uses of medicine as cultural ideology. -- from the Preface This book is a serious and original contribution to the history of popular medicine and its print culture. -- Christopher Lawrence, The Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine

Rosenberg, Steven Shapin, Jean Silver-Isenstadt, Steven Stowe.During the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century, most Americans healed themselves at home, as their ancestors had done for centuries. They relied upon books and pamphlets addressing health and diseases, diet, exercise, sex, mental health-everything one needed to know about how to avoid illness and what to do if illness or injury should strike. In Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene, Charles E. Rosenberg and his co-authors analyze these early health-oriented books, pamphlets, and broadsides-their origins, content, role, and authorship-and contribute to our understanding of their role in everyday life. Right Living also offers insight into the world views and bedside practices of another time by examining the shaping and transmission of the English and continental tradition, the persistent interest in sexual relations and their consequences, and the changing uses of print as a commodity and as a product of specific, time-bound technologies. Contributors: Kathleen Brown, Mary E. Fissell, William H. Helfand, Thomas A. Horrocks, Ronald L. Numbers, Charles E. Rosenberg, Steven Shapin, Jean Silver-Isenstadt, Steven Stowe.