author
Edward Jorden
1569–1632
Best known for challenging supernatural explanations of illness, this early modern English physician argued that some supposed cases of witchcraft had natural medical causes. His writing on “the suffocation of the mother” made him an important figure in the history of medicine and ideas about hysteria.
1 Audiobook
A Briefe Discovrse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother
by Edward Jorden
About the author
Born in 1569 at High Halden in Kent, he was educated at Oxford and later took his M.D. at Padua before building a medical career in London. He became a licentiate of the College of Physicians in 1595 and a fellow in 1597, then later settled in Bath, where he spent much of the rest of his life.
He is remembered above all for bringing a medical explanation to cases that others treated as witchcraft or possession. In A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (1603), he argued that such symptoms could arise from natural bodily causes, making the book a notable early English text in the history of hysteria and women's medicine.
Jorden was also known as a physician and chemist, and he wrote about the mineral waters of Bath as well as other medical subjects. He died in 1632, leaving a small but influential body of work that shows medicine beginning to move away from superstition and toward clinical explanation.