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3 books match the query 'Leong, Elaine'

cover of Learning to Cut: Surgical Training and Practice, 1450–1800

Learning to Cut

Surgical Training and Practice, 1450–1800

Edited by Maria Pia Donato, Elaine Leong, and Tillmann Taape

University College London, 2026

The first-ever volume to offer a broader European narrative on surgical training and education in the early modern era. 

This volume brings together case studies from the French, Italian, German, and English contexts to reveal diverse modes of surgical teaching and learning that were shaped by local contexts in early modern towns and cities. The chapters reveal the many spaces where practitioners learned and experienced surgery, shedding new light on the practice of early modern surgery.

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cover of Osiris, Volume 37: Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds

Osiris, Volume 37

Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds

Edited by Tara Alberts, Sietske Fransen, and Elaine Leong

University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022

Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period.

This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief.

Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.
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cover of Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England

Recipes and Everyday Knowledge

Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England

Elaine Leong

University of Chicago Press, 2018

Across early modern Europe, men and women from all ranks gathered medical, culinary, and food preservation recipes from family and friends, experts and practitioners, and a wide array of printed materials. Recipes were tested, assessed, and modified by teams of householders, including masters and servants, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, and fathers and sons. This much-sought know-how was written into notebooks of various shapes and sizes forming “treasuries for health,” each personalized to suit the whims and needs of individual communities.
 
In Recipes and Everyday Knowledge, Elaine Leong situates recipe knowledge and practices among larger questions of gender and cultural history, the history of the printed word, and the history of science, medicine, and technology. The production of recipes and recipe books, she argues, were at the heart of quotidian investigations of the natural world or “household science”. She shows how English homes acted as vibrant spaces for knowledge making and transmission, and explores how recipe trials allowed householders to gain deeper understandings of sickness and health, of the human body, and of natural and human-built processes. By recovering this story, Leong extends the parameters of natural inquiry and productively widens the cast of historical characters participating in and contributing to early modern science.
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