Anita Hoffmann
Research
Research
This project aims to increase the understanding of how ‘middling sorts’ of individuals in seventeenth-century London and England managed diseases and ailments they might have wished to keep private. People were rarely alone, and privacy was often associated with disrepute, secrecy, conspiracy, and subversion.
The project aims to answer the following three questions through mainly empirical research of original sources: What were afflictions that contemporaries considered needing privacy; how did sufferers approach the management or cure of such conditions; and what solutions were available to them? These sources could be diaries, correspondence, family recipe-books, popular medical literature, newsbooks, periodicals, almanacs, handbills, practitioners’ and apothecaries’ casebooks and accounts, and contemporary popular literature.
Papers and publications
Papers and publications
- 'The birth of proprietary medicine advertising and bookseller vendor networks c.1630-1670', Literature, Medicine and Science: an interdisciplinary conference, Birkbeck (October 2022).
- ‘The Birth of Proprietary Medicine Advertising’, Worshipful Society of Apothecaries History Fellows Meeting, November 2, 2023.
- ‘How a Local Medical Community Enabled England’s Global Ambitions’’, Cambridge Workshop for the Early Modern Period, March 4, 2024.
- ‘Medical Boom Town, East London 1630-1670’, Worshipful Society of Apothecaries History Fellows, Thomas Sydenham 300-year Anniversary Symposium, May 2, 2024.
- ‘”To Ladies and all Others of the Female Sex": Seventeenth Century Commercial Women’s Medicine and Shame’, Lund-York-Bielefeld PGR conference, Lund, Sweden, Jun 10-11, 2024.
- ‘”For a Weakness of the Back”: Medical Advertisements for Women’s life-stage ailments, 1650-1730’, Early Modern Ageing and Health Conference, Cambridge University, June 24, 2024.
- ‘Seventeenth Century Commercial Women’s Medicine and Shame’, York History PGR conference October 4, 2024.
- “‘Not Fit Here to Mention”: Women’s Ailments and Shame in Medical Advertising 1650-1730’, Cambridge History of Memory and Emotions Workshop, November 19, 2024.
- ‘Women’s Ailments in Medical Advertising 1650-1730’, CHASE MEMRN PGR Conference, UAE Norwich, November 8, 2024
- ‘A Recipe for Disaster: Hidden Cures for the Secret Disease in 17C Family Recipe Books’, York History PGR conference, January 25, 2025.
- ‘Salvator Winter, Charles II’s Royally Appointed Quack’, London Archives Lightning Talks, January 29, 2025
- ‘Mrs Garway – Medicine Empire Building and Commercial Innovation 1692-1740’, Cambridge Long Eighteenth Century Seminar, March 4, 2025.
