The Reading Early Medicine (REM) project documents and makes searchable (by title, author, subject, etc.) all pre-1700 medical books published in English. The database contains entries for almost 3000 titles, 1500 persons (authors, publishers, and booksellers) and 500 sites (printing houses and bookshops).
Our browsing feature on "Books", "Book Producers" and "Sites of Book Production" offers possibilities to apply limits by dates, authors, booksellers, printer, and genres. Note that once a limit has been applied, any further browsing will occur within this limited dataset.
The browsing pages on "Topics" and "Genres" will bring up simple lists of all books, persons, and places in the database sorted by assigned topics or genres.
Type in any word in the grey box to start a search in all fields. This searches through the entire database, including context essays, books producers and street names and signs.
Search for multiple terms in specific fields. This search returns only books.
Users can analyze our data using programs such as Platin (histograms), Palladio (network analysis), and Voyant (word clouds and text mining). You can also download comma-separated-value (CSV) files of specific data sets.
Reading Early Medicine (REM) aims to build a community of scholars and students sharing ideas and knowledge about early English medicine.
Teaching resources such as sample lesson plans and syllabi.
Short introductory essays on various topics related to early medicine.
Links to other useful websites.
The modern specialty of obstetrics and gynecology did not exists as such in the early modern period. Physicians might deal with women’s reproductive health, but the more common reproductive healer was the midwife.