1. The quote in the title of this article is taken from Lazarus Riverius (Lazare Rivière), The Practice of Physick (London, 1655 [1640]), 506. Note on spelling. Typographical differences in primary source quotations have been modernised (e.g. ‘u’ for ‘v’, ‘j’ for ‘i’, ‘s’ for long ‘f’).
2. ‘To[o] much eating stifles the child’: fat bodies and reproduction in early modern England
3. Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 52–3 and ch. 2 for publication history. Mary Fissell's more recent work has identified well over 100 editions of this text as it continued to be published into the twentieth century. On this and other popular texts attributed to Aristotle, see Mary E. Fissell, ‘Making a Masterpiece: The Aristotle Texts in Vernacular Medical Culture’, in Charles E. Rosenberg, ed., Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 59–87.
4. See, for example, J. Pollexfen, A Discourse of Trade, Coyn and Paper Credit (1697), cited in D. C. Coleman, ‘Labour in the English Economy of the Seventeenth Century’, in Paul S. Seaver, ed., Seventeenth-Century England: Society in an Age of Revolution (New York and London: New Viewpoints, 1976), 112–38, 113.
5. E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 161–2, 236. See also Table A3.1, 528–9.