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Chapter 2 - Streets: Shopping for Cures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2026

Olivia Weisser
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Boston
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Summary

Chapter 2 shifts from representation to reality by looking at how patients navigated the city in search of cures. We follow a student as he searches for a healing powder in the back room of a coffee shop and imagine patients navigating the city in search of cures, often armed with little more than a healer’s inexact address. Using promotional material and advertisements, the chapter charts 230 different shops, taverns, bathhouses, and homes where antivenereal remedies were sold between 1650 and 1750. Mapping an urban geography of pox cures exposes the sheer number of medicines for sale for a single disease and how purchasing them brought patients far from the neighborhoods and homes of specific healers. Venereal treatments could be had just about anywhere in early modern London, from upscale thoroughfares to cheese shops and bookstalls lining the Royal Exchange. What is more, patients could find the very same remedy at a range of retail establishments, a uniform shopping experience that historians tend to associate with department stores of the Victorian era.

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