My Life's Travels and Adventures: An Eighteenth-Century Oculist in the Ottoman Empire and the European Hinterland (Volume 78) (The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series)

In her never-finished My Life’s Travels and Adventures , the eighteenth-century Polish doctor Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa plays a myriad of roles, including child bride, wife, mother, lover, adventuress, slave trader, writer, and home-taught physician. She successfully carved out a viable niche for herself, navigating the multicultural, multiethnic, and varied religious environment of Europe’s eastern periphery. Despite limited expectations for female professionals, she became a highly sought after and well-respected practitioner of the medical arts and rose to the position of court physician to Turkish pashas and Hungarian princes, and even to Sultan Mustafa III. My Life’s Travels and Adventures— part memoir, part autobiography, and part travelogue—provides a view into eighteenth-century social, professional, and gender interactions and weaves a rich narrative replete with vignettes of love, travel, and popular superstitions important to our historical, ethnographic, and religious understanding of the era. This edition brings the entirety of this personal and idiosyncratic memoir to English for the first time. Cover Series Page Title Page Contents Acknowledgments Introduction The Other Voice Her Life, Her Book, and Her Times The Emancipate’s Journey Pilsztynowa as Other, Pilsztynowa and Others Note on Locations and the Translation My Life’s Travels and Adventures Preface, To the Estimable Reader Chapter One, First Journey to Istanbul, and Other Adventures Chapter Two, My Second Marriage, and Other Adventures Chapter Three, The Disagreement with Mr. Bekierski, and My Cavalier Chapter Four, My Second Arrival in Istanbul Chapter Five, The Turkish Sect Chapter Six, The Route to Jerusalem Chapter Seven, About Fasting on Saturdays Appendix One: Glossary of Places Appendix Two: Pilsztynowa’s Patients Appendix Three: Chronology Bibliography Index Series Titles "A memoir of the journeys of the eighteenth-century Polish oculist Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa through the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, Poland-Lithuania, and Russia, detailing her experience as a stranger in distant lands, a Catholic Pole in a Muslim society, and a successful woman physician in a field reserved for men"-- Provided by publisher