This mirroring of experiences, known as ‘fellow-feeling’, reveals the depth of love between many individuals. The third perspective concerns the patient’s loved ones it shows that family and friends usually shared the feelings of patients, undergoing a dramatic transformation from anguish to elation. At the heart of getting better was contrast – from ‘paine to ease, sadnesse to mirth, prison to liberty, and death to life’. Secondly, the book adopts the viewpoint of patients themselves: it investigates how they reacted to the escape from death, the abatement of pain and suffering, and the return to normal life and work. This includes a discussion of convalescent care, a special branch of medicine designed to restore strength to the patient’s fragile body after illness. The book takes three main perspectives: the first is physiological or medical, asking what doctors and laypeople meant by recovery, and how they thought it occurred. Drawing on an array of archival and printed materials, Misery to Mirth shows that recovery did exist conceptually at this time, and that it was a widely reported phenomenon. This book seeks to rebalance and brighten our overall picture of early modern health by focusing on the neglected subject of recovery from illness in England, c.1580-1720. It implies that people fell ill, took ineffective remedies, and died. The history of early modern medicine often makes for depressing reading.
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