On Texas Christian University Week: Misinformation in the medical field is not new.
Melissa Reynolds, assistant professor of early modern European history, looks back to find out more.
Faculty Bio:
Melissa Reynolds is a historian of early modern Europe whose research examines how ordinary people understood their relationship to medical and scientific knowledge and to the natural world around them. She received her PhD from Rutgers University and held fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University prior to her appointment as Assistant Professor of History at TCU. She is author of Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (University of Chicago Press, 2024) and co-edits The Recipes Project, a scholarly digital publication focused on recipes and their role in the histories of food, art, magic, medicine, and science.
Transcript:
The circulation of medical misinformation on social media has been in the news a lot—so much so that it sometimes feels like we’re the first people in history to deal with the problem. But 500 years ago, readers had to wade through a similar quagmire of unverified medical knowledge.
As a historian of early modern medicine, I’ve spent the past decade researching how readers in Tudor England navigated the dramatic increase in medical publishing between 1485 when the printing press was first brought to England, and 1557, when the Stationer’s Company was established to license and authorize printed books. Over those seven decades, printers produced more than 350 editions of medical books in English, offering advice on everything from how to cure the plague to how to eat a healthy diet.
What I found was that these books contained very old knowledge that had circulated among English readers for centuries in handwritten manuscripts. What changed, in other words, wasn’t the medical advice itself; what changed was that for the first time, printers had a commercial incentive to propagate this advice. It didn’t matter to printers whether miracle cures worked. What mattered was that books sold.
Understanding the dynamics of medical marketing from 500 years ago can help us see our present problem of medical misinformation in a new light: this is not the first time that new media has generated new commercial incentives that end up destabilizing medical expertise. At the same, this history suggests a way forward: in Tudor England, printers eventually organized to regulate the free-for-all market created by print.
