The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England

This work is a collection of studies on health, medicine and poverty in Tudor and Stuart England. It concentrates on the health experience of the majority of the population in this period - artisans, labourers, servants, the poor and women, and especially older women. Some of the themes that run through the text include the high level of anxiety about health and illness at the time, the lay involvement in medicine, the effects of urbanization on the health of vulnerable age groups and the sensitivity of chronic disease as an indicator of social conditions.