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Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine
During early modernity, medico-legal concerns with timing puberty gave way to physiological and medical-hygienic concerns with pubertal timing. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical-jurisprudential tracts isolated rare cases of conception before the legal marriage age. Scattered reports of “mon...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Oxford University Press
2020
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7737932/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33186444 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jraa045 |
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author | Janssen, Diederik F |
author_facet | Janssen, Diederik F |
author_sort | Janssen, Diederik F |
collection | PubMed |
description | During early modernity, medico-legal concerns with timing puberty gave way to physiological and medical-hygienic concerns with pubertal timing. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical-jurisprudential tracts isolated rare cases of conception before the legal marriage age. Scattered reports of “monstrously” early menarche and “prodigious” male puberty were offered from the latter half of the seventeenth century. Tied to excess heat, moisture, plethora and climate since antiquity, in the second half of the eighteenth century pubertal timing attracted sustained commentary regarding the purported role of social stressors, from novel-reading to diet and trousers. Both the known variability and strikingly outlying instances of pubertal timing thus provided an inroad to unravelling such perennial explanatory devices as temperament, constitution, and life style. Despite and in part because of its explanatory significance in early modern physiology, leading eighteenth-century nosologists did not yet itemize precocious puberty. One precocious boy described in the 1740s, the Willingham Prodigy, provided the best documented early medical and public response. Formal nosological interest followed by the 1760s, initially under Haller’s heading of excessive growth (incrementum nimium, tied to enhanced circulation) and only much later under Meckel the Younger’s heading of premature development (vorschnelle Entwicklung). |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7737932 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | Oxford University Press |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-77379322020-12-21 Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine Janssen, Diederik F J Hist Med Allied Sci Articles During early modernity, medico-legal concerns with timing puberty gave way to physiological and medical-hygienic concerns with pubertal timing. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical-jurisprudential tracts isolated rare cases of conception before the legal marriage age. Scattered reports of “monstrously” early menarche and “prodigious” male puberty were offered from the latter half of the seventeenth century. Tied to excess heat, moisture, plethora and climate since antiquity, in the second half of the eighteenth century pubertal timing attracted sustained commentary regarding the purported role of social stressors, from novel-reading to diet and trousers. Both the known variability and strikingly outlying instances of pubertal timing thus provided an inroad to unravelling such perennial explanatory devices as temperament, constitution, and life style. Despite and in part because of its explanatory significance in early modern physiology, leading eighteenth-century nosologists did not yet itemize precocious puberty. One precocious boy described in the 1740s, the Willingham Prodigy, provided the best documented early medical and public response. Formal nosological interest followed by the 1760s, initially under Haller’s heading of excessive growth (incrementum nimium, tied to enhanced circulation) and only much later under Meckel the Younger’s heading of premature development (vorschnelle Entwicklung). Oxford University Press 2020-11-13 /pmc/articles/PMC7737932/ /pubmed/33186444 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jraa045 Text en © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com |
spellingShingle | Articles Janssen, Diederik F Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine |
title |
Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine |
title_full |
Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine |
title_fullStr |
Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine |
title_full_unstemmed |
Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine |
title_short |
Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine |
title_sort | puer barbatus: precocious puberty in early modern medicine |
topic | Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7737932/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33186444 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jraa045 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT janssendiederikf puerbarbatusprecociouspubertyinearlymodernmedicine |