The Ohio University Department of History announces the 36th Costa Lecture, “Meeting Monsters in the Streets of Restoration London,” by Dr. Mary Fissel on Tuesday, Oct. 8, at 7:30 p.m. at the Walter Hall Rotunda.
Mary Fissel
Fissel is Professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, where she also co-edits the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Her scholarly work focuses on past understandings of health, healing, and the natural world. Her most recent book is Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Motherhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2004). She is currently writing a social and cultural history of Aristotle’s Masterpiece, an extraordinarily long-lived popular medical book about sex and reproduction.
Not written by Aristotle and not usually considered a masterpiece, Aristotle’s Masterpiece was a best-selling medical book about sex and babies that first appeared in the late 1600s and, hundreds of editions later, was still circulating in the 1930s on both sides of the Atlantic.
Fissel will explore the reasons for the book’s popularity, in particular how the book’s illustrations of monstrous beings echoed concerns about deformity and disability in late 17th century London, says Dr. Mariana Dantas, Associate Professor of History in the College of Arts & Sciences and Director of Latin American Studies..
This event is free and open to the public.
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