ABSTRACT
In early modern thought, minds and bodies were intimately related. Women's physical experiences, their illnesses and disturbances, were connected with their psychological states, and the humours that constituted the body had a profound effect on both physical and mental health. The women who consulted physicians and astrologers told stories of griefs and upsets or disturbing dreams, followed by disrupted menstrual periods, aches in the back, stomach, or heart, and sleep-lessness. Alice Chapman, a 30-year-old woman, went to consult Richard Napier in 1607, complaining of what he noted as ‘A grief taken some three years ago about her friends, short-winded, pain in the breast and back, ill by fits, no child this ten years, her sickness [menstruation] not above a day, but only a show, urine white and thin’. 1 In humoral explanations of the female constitution, melancholy was associated with an imbalance in humours, and the remedies were physical.
