Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern ‘Medical Marketplace’

Abstract

Conventionally, the relationships which have loomed largest in the historiographical terrain of the early modern ‘medical marketplace’ have been between paid practitioners and patients. In this chapter, we want to bring into clearer view another relationship which frequently mediated any association between patient and practitioner: the relationships between lay people as cultivators and communicators of medical information. As we show, by studying how people communicated information about treatments, particularly recipes for remedies, some of the processes of constructing personalized medical knowledge can be recovered. One crucial factor in these exchange relationships was the degree of trust placed in the supplier of a recipe. Our analysis of recipe transmission therefore also allows us to examine from the lay perspective one of the central issues of discussions of the medical marketplace. While trust has been explored as a factor in patient/practitioner interactions in early modern medical encounters in England by Lucinda Beier, Roy and Dorothy Porter and more recently Steven Shapin, the same cannot be said of the operation of trust and trustworthiness in the sphere of domestic medicine.¹