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‘Cough, Creaks, and Shuffling Feet: The Gender-Neutral Nature of Old Age in English Household Medicine, 1500-1700’.
| By the end of the seventeenth century, the locus of medical care for most of England’s population, was still firmly entrenched in the hands of the local housewife or gentry household, despite the ever-expanding medical market place. Drawing upon the contents of thirty-eight manuscript medical recipe books (ranging between 1500 and 1730), it appears that the elderly were no longer experiencing the ailments of old age as something to be endured, but to be treated. In this sense, old age was being medicalized, even at the lower levels of society, by the end of the seventeenth century: a full century earlier than previously believed. What also emerges clearly from these manuscripts is the gender-neutral nature of the physical symptoms of growing old. While women experienced menopause, it was rarely discussed in learned medicine before 1650 and virtually not at all in popular/manuscript accounts. The result for most old women in the country-side and provincial towns was an old age that was characterized by pains and troubles shared with their husbands and witnessed in their fathers. In many ways the lived experienced was much like the Ancients’ claim that the bodies of old women became to physically resemble those of old men.
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