Books, Bodies and Minds

LRBS Week 2: 23 - 27 June 2025

A special course hosted by the Wellcome Collection

What roles do books play in relation to health across time and space? What stories can be found about people’s experiences of illness and treatment? Which stories cannot? Through close examination of original printed books and manuscripts in the library at Wellcome Collection, one of the world’s most important collections of medical books, students will learn how recipe collections, health manuals, herbals, plague tracts and other types of medical book were created, read and adapted. They will gain skills in handling and studying these items, having opportunities to assess formats, signs of use and other features. The course aims to analyse the powerful narratives around medicine shaped by books from the medieval period to the present day, as well their strengths and limitations in showing different experiences of health. It will look at the history and materiality of books and manuscripts from across the globe, as well as how you can see different perspectives and experiences within the same material. It will also consider the impact of collecting, loss and survival on understandings of health and medicine.

By the end of the course students will be able to:

engage with health-related printed books and manuscripts as both texts and objects
interpret the relationship between books and the history of health and medicine
appreciate variations and commonalities among health-related books across time and space
analyse the impact of use, collecting and survival on material evidence
identify the gaps and bias in collections around experiences of health and medicine

Alexandra Hill, When is a duplicate not a duplicate? Multiple copies and discoveries in the Early Printed Books – Wellcome Stacks blog post 2023 [https://stacks.wellcomecollection.org/when-is-a-duplicate-not-a-duplicate-multiple-copies-and-discoveries-in-the-early-printed-books-7442e8f9286e]
Alexandra Hill, ‘Transience and Loss’, in Adam Smyth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Book in Early Modern England (OUP: Oxford, 2023), pp. 633-650 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198846239.013.31
Elma Brenner, ‘The reception, consumption and broader context of a French vernacular plague tract printed in 1495’, Nuncius, 36:2 (2021), 304–24 https://doi.org/10.1163/18253911-03602004.
Sarah Fiddyment, Natalie J. Goodison, Elma Brenner, Stefania Signorello, Kierri Price and Matthew J. Collins, ‘Girding the loins? Direct evidence of the use of a medieval English parchment birthing girdle from biomolecular analysis’, Royal Society Open Science, 8:3 (March 2021) http://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.202055.
Patrick Outhwaite, ‘Two Manuscripts of the Practica Phisicalia Magistri Johannis de Burgundia and their Censorship’, Journal of the Early Book Society, 21 (2018), 251-258.