Roy porter student prize essay: Boils, pushes and wheals: Reading bumps on the body in early Modern England

Abstract

Bodily bumps in early modern England were not simply collections of humors that needed to be lanced and drained. Diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of skin swellings comprised a deeply rich semiotics that both patients and healers read according to a range of biographical factors, incidents, sensations, observations and experiences. Using diaries and case histories in seventeenth-century surgical texts, this article explores how both patients and healers read and treated bodily bumps. It then looks at patients and healers together during medical encounters in order to show how both parties' interpretations and observations of the body created a collaborative interpretation of health. The article shows that, long before the development of physical diagnosis in the nineteenth century, surgeons were pressing and prodding patients' bodies to discern the nature and severity of external ailments. Thus, in addition to the patient narrative, touching and manipulating the body were often significant aspects of medical diagnosis and practice in the early modern period.