Mary E. Fissell, MA, PhD
Highlights
Languages
- English
Gender
FemaleJohns Hopkins Affiliations:
- Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Faculty
About Mary E. Fissell
Primary Academic Title
Professor of History of Medicine
Background
Dr. Mary E. Fissell is professor of history of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, with appointments in the History of Science and Technology and History departments. Her scholarly work focuses on how ordinary people in early modern England understood health, healing and the natural world.
She supervises graduate students admitted to the History of Medicine department and offers fields for students in other departments as well; she welcomes inquiries about graduate training.
She is currently working on a book about Aristotle’s Masterpiece, the best-selling early-modern book on sex and reproduction.
Dr. Fissell received her B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she wrote her dissertation in the history and sociology department under the direction of Charles Rosenberg. She joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 1992.
Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, Dr. Fissell was a lecturer and research associate at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the University of Manchester.
She teaches a range of courses, including undergraduate and graduate surveys in the history of medicine; the history of science, technology, and medicine methods seminar; and a graduate research seminar on popular knowledge. She coedits the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
Research Interests
Books and reading in early modern England and the Atlantic world, Early-modern medicine, Gender, sexuality and the history of the body, Popular culture, The patient's perspective in the history of medicine
Lab Website
Mary Fissell Lab
- Research in the Mary Fissell Lab looks at the ways in which average people in early modern England understood health, healing and the natural world. In an ongoing study of vernacular knowledge (ideas about the natural world that ordinary people created, shaped and used), we are examining the popular medical book Aristotle's Masterpiece, first published in 1684. Research has also focused on health care for the poor in 18th-century urban Britain and on how ordinary people learned about their bodies from inexpensive print publications.
Research Summary
Dr. Fissell's scholarly work focuses on how ordinary people in early modern England understood health, healing and the natural world.
Her first book examined how health care for the poor functioned in an 18th-century British city, arguing that Bristol's working people shaped an urban health-care system through the choices they made—limited though those choices may have been.
More recently, she has focused on how ordinary people understood their bodies, particularly reproduction, by looking at cheap print. Vernacular Bodies (Oxford, 2004) explored how everyday ideas about making babies mediated large-scale social changes, because talking about the reproductive female body was also a way to talk about gender relations and thus all relations of power.
Her current work continues to examine vernacular knowledge—ideas about the natural world that ordinary people used, made, shaped and practiced. She connects the histories of gender, the body and sexuality with those of popular culture and cheap print in the Atlantic world in a project focusing on an extraordinary popular medical book called Aristotle's Masterpiece. First published in 1684, it was still for sale in sleazy London sex shops in the 1920s, having retained its currency for over two centuries.
Selected Publications
- Fissell ME. "Introduction: women, health, and healing in early modern Europe." Bull Hist Med. 2008 Spring;82(1):1-17. doi: 10.1353/bhm.2008.0024.
- Fissell ME. “The Doctor-Patient Relationship.” The Cambridge History of Medical Ethics Eds. Robert Baker and Lawrence McCullough. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. 501-17. Print.
- Fissell ME. “Healing Spaces.” The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing. Ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.
- Fissell ME. “Going Vernacular.” Journal of Women’s History. 2010;22(3):209-213. doi: 10.1353/jowh.2010.0593.
- Fissell ME. "A Book of Receipts of All Sorts: Elizabeth Strachey, 1693-1730s." Hidden Treasure. Ed. Michael Sappol. New York: Blast Books, 2012. 204-5. Print.
- “Women and Medicine.” Oxford Bibliographies in Renaissance and Reformation. Ed. Margaret King. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Print.
Courses & Syllabi
- History of Medicine: Antiquity to the Scientific Revolution, SOM 150.705
- History of Medicine: Antiquity to the Scientific Revolution, HSMT 140.105
- An Introduction to Historical Methods, HSMT 140.601
- Popular Knowledge, SOM 140.703
- What Is the Cultural History of Medicine?, SOM 140.628
Honors
- Grant, National Library of Medicine (NIH 1G13LM010198-01), 1/1/10
- Honorable Mention for Vernacular Bodies, Katharine Briggs Folklore Award, 1/1/05
- Grant, National Library of Medicine (NIH 1 G13 LM07054-01), 1/1/01
- Fellowship, Folger Institute, 1/1/00
- Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies (declined), 1/1/97
- Fellowship, Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, 1/1/97
- Course Development Grant, Hughes Foundation, 1/1/92
Professional Activities
- Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Co-Editor, 1/1/06
- Cambridge University Library, Co-Curator, 1/1/11
- Johns Hopkins University, Acting Director, 1/1/13
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Section Editor, 1/1/96 - 1/1/99
- Vernacular Health and Healing, Director, 1/1/06 - 1/1/07