Mary Fissell
Johns Hopkins University, History of Medicine, Faculty Member
- History, History of Medicine and the Body, Gender History, History of the Book, History of Sexuality, Animals and non-humans, and 11 moreSocial History of Medicine, Social History, Early Modern History, History of Medicine, Women's History, Gender, Gender and Sexuality, Sexuality, Early Modern Europe, Early Modern England, and Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Literatureedit
- I am a professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, with appointments in ... moreI am a professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, with appointments in the History of Science and the History Departments at Hopkins. I received my BA and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where I wrote my dissertation in the History and Sociology Department under the direction of Charles Rosenberg.
My scholarly work focuses on how ordinary people in early modern England understood health, healing, and the natural world. My first book (Patients, Power, and the Poor, Cambridge 1991) examined how health care for the poor functioned in an 18th century British city, arguing that Bristol's working people shaped an urban health-care system through the choices they made -- limited as those choices may have been. More recently, I have focused on how ordinary people understood their bodies, particularly reproduction, by looking at cheap print. Vernacular Bodies (Oxford, 2004) explored how everyday ideas about making babies mediated large scale social changes, because talking about the reproductive female body was also a way to talk about gender relations and thus all relations of power. My current project continues to examine vernacular knowledge -- ideas about the natural world that ordinary people used, made, shaped, and practiced. I’m connecting the histories of gender, the body, and sexuality with those of popular culture and cheap print in the Atlantic world by focusing on an extraordinary popular medical book called Aristotle's Masterpiece. First published in 1684, it was still for sale in sleazy London sex shops in the 1930s, having somehow retained its currency for over 2 centuries.
I teach a range of courses at Hopkins, including undergraduate and graduate surveys in the history of medicine, our graduate Methods seminar, and graduate research seminars on popular knowledge, colonial knowledge, the cultural history of medicine and science, as well as teaching medical students and supervising graduate students. I co-edit the Bulletin of the History of Medicine with Randall Packard.edit
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Page 1. 43 MARY E. FISSELL The Politics of Reproduction in the English Reformation I J B a catalog of his collection of curi-osities. He intended to leave his collection to Canterbury Cathedral, where he was a prebendary. ...
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Research Interests:
Page 1. Urban History, vol. 19, pt.2 (October 1992). Copyright © Cambridge University Press Health in the city: putting together the pieces MARY E. FISSELL For historians, medical Philadelphia is traditionally a city of firsts, including... more
Page 1. Urban History, vol. 19, pt.2 (October 1992). Copyright © Cambridge University Press Health in the city: putting together the pieces MARY E. FISSELL For historians, medical Philadelphia is traditionally a city of firsts, including ...
Research Interests:
brief essay on Public Domian Review
Research Interests:
Here's a link to a talk I gave at the Huntington Library in April 2015; it's a big-picture look at the Aristotle's masterpiece project.