Medicine, Healing and the Family in Wales c. 1600 - c. 1750. (360G-Wellcome-080655_Z_06_Z)

In general, my thesis will explore the nature of the familial experience of sickness and medicine within seventeenth and early eighteenth century Wales. Key goals will be a) To establish the nature and experience of sickness in early modern Wales, and particularly that of rural Wales b) To explore attitudes to disability within the family c) To locate medical ideas and practices within the social structure of Wales, in order to establish whether social position influenced medical beliefs d) To address the lack of historiography in this subject area in Wales. To address such questions, a wide range of source material will be utilised, including domestic medical recipe collections, wills, diaries and personal records, family papers and poor law records. Such a broad spectrum of sources will allow a more nuanced approach to be adopted, accounting for regional variations and the importance of localism in early modern Wales. Equally, such regional studies will address the wider question of whether there could be considered a coherently 'Welsh' medical experience in this period.