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.