The Reading Early Medicine (REM) project aims to engage students, teachers, and researchers with early medicine (ca. 1480-1700) in its varied and rich forms, and to facilitate their interactions with printed sources through a website and bibliographical database. Co-directed by JHU History of Medicine professor Mary Fissell and Elaine Leong, a lecturer in history at University College London, the project was hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin before its transfer to the Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries.

This event is co-sponsored by the Virginia Fox Stern Center for the Study of the Book in the Renaissance and the Department of the History of Medicine.

Speaker

Olivia Weisser is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston, a member of the REM advisory board, and a Hopkins alumna. Her research specialty is health, healing, and the body in Britain in the 1500s-1700s. Her first book, Ill Composed (Yale University Press 2015), examined how gender shaped patients’ perceptions of sickness in the 1600s and 1700s. The book was a finalist for the 2015 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Award and short-listed for a 2016 British Medical Association Book Award.

Weisser is currently working on a new book on the history of venereal disease. This research focuses on a group of venereal specialists living and working in London in the early 1700s. While centered on a single disease, the project tells a broader story about life in the city, everyday beliefs about sexuality, medical retailing, and clinical practice.

Weisser earned her PhD in the history of medicine from the Johns Hopkins Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and her BA in history from Wesleyan University.

The Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance was established with a permanent endowment in 2017 to support lectures, fellowships, master classes, symposia, and publications related to the Sheridan Libraries' premodern and early modern rare book and manuscript collections. The center’s focus encompasses the historical reception of classical and medieval thought and the culture and influence of the Renaissance throughout the early modern period.

For additional information email sterncenter@jhu.edu.