Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, by Mary Lindemann

This is a fascinating work. The author, Mary Lindemann, covers an immense range of material and topics. She has produced a work of original scholarship in terms of the way in which she brings together leading research across the field of early modern medicine. It will undoubtedly be of interest to historians of medicine, but perhaps the people who will most benefit from the book are scholars in other fields and disciplines. Lindemann comments that ‘there is much to be won from revisiting and reevaluating received wisdoms’ (p. 83) and in many ways this revisionist agenda is the central ethos of the volume. There are numerous myths that Lindemann targets in her study, including the ideas that no one dissected a human body in the medieval period and that changes in midwifery were designed to disempower women healers. Lindemann demonstrates that these, and a number of similar myths, are simply wrong.

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