Mary E. Fissell, Ph.D. 
Institute for the History of Medicine
The Johns Hopkins University
1900 East Monument Street
Baltimore, MD 21205 Phone: 410-614-0286
e-mail: mfissell@jhmi.edu European health care and popular medicine, 17th and 18th centuries; early modern gender and the body. Research: I'm working on a book about Aristotle's Masterpiece, the best-selling early-modern book on sex and reproduction. First published in 1684, it was still for sale, little-altered, in sleazy London sex shops of the 1920s. The book interests me because it has such a long and curious life . Seemingly everything around it changed - gender roles and relations, ideas about the physiology of reproduction, the site of childbirth -- and yet this small book continued to be bought and sold (and maybe even read!) Second, I think that this book is a wonderful way into thinking about vernacular knowledge - the kinds of knowledge about the body and the natural world that ordinary people had and employed. I'd like to develop new ways for us to think about what we used to call "popular" knowledge, ways that make it both more and less than the trickledown of elite thinking. Recent Publications: Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2004). “Making Meaning from the Margins: The New Cultural History of Medicine.” John Warner and Frank Huisman, eds., Medical History: The Stories and their Meanings, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press (2004). “The Politics of Reproduction in the English Reformation.” Representations 87 (Summer 2004): 43-81. "Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle's Masterpiece", William and Mary Quarterly, LX (2003): 43-74. "Making a Masterpiece: The Aristotle Texts in Vernacular Medical Culture," in Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine ed. Charles E. Rosenberg, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. "Constructing Vermin in Seventeenth-Century England", History Workshop Journal, no. 47 (1999), 1-29. Reprinted in Identity and Alterity, ed. William Chester Jordan and Angela Creager, Amsterdam: Brepols, 2001. "Gender and Generation: Representing Reproduction in Early Modern England," Gender and History 7 (1995), 433-456. Reprinted in The Sexualities in History Reader, ed. Kim Phillips and Barry Reay, London: Routledge, 2001. Course Syllabi: HSMT 140.601, Fall 2005: An Introduction to Historical Methods PAS 1 Selective, Spring 2003: Historical Perspectives on Gender, Race and Medicine HSMT 140.703 Fall 2003: Popular Knowledge History of STM 140.628: What is the Cultural History of Medicine (Science and Technology)? | 
