By Brian Nance
Wellcome Institute

Turquet de Mayerne was a court physician whose patients included Oliver Cromwell, Car-dinal Richelieu, John Donne and the royalty of mid 17th-century England and France. Unlike most medicos of his day, Mayerne kept meticulous case books, which have survived, describing his day-to-day practice and his approach to diagnosis and treatment.

Brian Nance, an associate professor of history whose speciality is Renaissance Europe, had decided to make Mayerne’s case books the subject of his doctoral dissertation back when he was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The case books represented a rich source for research, but few historians had written about Mayerne at any length because the eminent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper was planning a biography and the subject was considered to be “taken.”

“But fools rush in . . . ,” says Nance, who, while he was in London for a summer as a Wellcome Institute research fellow, contacted Lord Trevor-Roper for an interview. The famous author, educator and public figure, known for helping break the German code in World War II and for many books including The Last Days of Hitler, invited Nance to tea at the House of Lords. The two historians compared notes and talked about sources.

Nance had determined that he would confine his study strictly to the medical aspects of Mayerne’s life. Based on a careful study of the case books, Nance found patterns linking Mayerne’s ideas and innovations, which greatly advanced the theory and practice of medicine, to broader currents in baroque culture and art. The last chapter, a mini who-done-it, describes the mysterious death of a royal prince and the subsequent controversy in which Mayerne was involved.

Nance sent his manuscript to the Cambridge and Harvard University presses, and though it received good reviews, both publishers eventually declined it. However, the manuscript was eagerly picked up as part of a series of books on the history of medicine sponsored by the distinguished Wellcome Institute, a private British foundation devoted to medical education and research.
 

By Daniel James Ennis
University of Delaware Press

The British Empire was built by sea power. In order to wage His Majesty’s wars and enforce British dominion around the globe in the 18th century, the Royal Navy required a tremendous force of sailors, and there was often a shortage in the ranks. The government, determined to rule the waves, initiated a process known as impressment, or “the press” – recruitment by force. Gangs of sailors, led by officers, would raid merchant ships or waterfront docks and coerce unwilling seamen into naval service.

Dan Ennis, assistant professor of English at Coastal, became interested in the press-gang phenomenon while reading Tobias Smollett’s 1748 novel Roderick Random. (Ennis’ specialty is 18th-century British literature.) More reading gave him a sense of the extent of the practice and the varying degrees of disfavor and outrage it evoked in English society.

“Everyone who lived in the British isles from the Restoration to Waterloo, it seems, had an opinion on impressment, and literature helped form those opinions,” says Ennis, who took the subject for his doctoral dissertation at Auburn University. He was particularly interested in how public attitudes about impressment varied according to social class and how these attitudes were molded and reinforced by the spin of specific, class-conscious genres.

“Basically, the consumers of a particular type of writing could expect that genre to reflect and inform their particular concerns about the press,” says Ennis. Ballads and songs enjoyed by the lower classes told stories about brutal press gangs which forced poor young men to sea and to perpetual poverty. Upper and middle-class theater patrons attended plays in which press gangs were presented not as instruments of oppression but as handy enforcers of social order and protectors of trade.

Ennis did research for the book in London and at the Library of Congress as well in university libraries at Auburn, Duke, Indiana, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of South Carolina.