Book Review

摘要

In , Olivia Weisser analyses approximately ninety primary sources from 1630–1730 to provide vivid pictures of how the sick thought about, experienced and communicated their sufferings. Her primary concern is to capture the voices of patients with the title phrase ‘ill composed’ referring to both the physical state of sickness and the act of writing about it (p. 15). This is above all a sociological study influenced by the theories of Talcott Parsons from the 1950s, and Weisser views both sickness and gender as socio-culturally constructed. In the introduction she defines sickness as ‘a learned and patterned cultural exchange’ (p. 2). The author argues that illness can best be viewed as stories of symptoms that came and went and needed to be interpreted and communicated by patients. This gave them varying degrees of autonomy and authority that would fade away after the 1730s with the rise of increasingly scientific or disease-based medicine. Gender as a concept is not examined in any detail but it becomes evident this book is an attempt to ameliorate the neglect of it in the historiography of early modern patients and practitioners.