SOURCE: “Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Uses of the Vernacular Medical Literature of Tudor England,” in Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Charles Webster, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 237-61.

In the following essay, Slack examines the nature and influence of vernacular medical literature in England from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, arguing that it was the social elite and not the poor who would have read them.

It was the ‘compassion that I have of the poor people’ which moved the author of the most popular medical work of the sixteenth century to put pen to paper, so that ‘every man, woman and child’ might ‘be their own physician in time of need’. So wrote Thomas Moulton, whose Mirror or Glass of Health went through at least seventeen editions between 1530 and 1580.¹ Other writers followed what seemed to...