Health, disease and society in Europe, 1500-1800 A source book

by Elmer, Peter; Grell, Ole Peter

• ISBN13: 9780719067372
• ISBN10: 0719067375
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-12-25
• Publisher: MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Summary

The period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment constitutes a vital phase in the history of European medicine. Elements of continuity with the classical and medieval past are evident in the ongoing importance of a humor-based view of medicine and the treatment of illness. At the same time, new theories of the body emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to challenge established ideas in medical circles. In recent years, scholars have explored this terrain with increasingly fascinating results, often revising our previous understanding of the ways in which early modern Europeans discussed the body, health and disease. In order to understand these and related processes, historians are increasingly aware of the way in which every aspect of medical care and provision in early modern Europe was shaped by the social, religious, political and cultural concerns of the age.

Author Biography

Peter Elmer is Senior Lecturer of History of Science, Technology and Medicine, The Open University.

OlT Peter Grell is Lecturer in Early Modern History, The Open University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	x
Introduction	xiv
Part one -- Medical practice and theory: the classical and medieval heritage	1	(29)
Galen's approach to health and disease: The Art of Medicine	1	(4)
A medieval consilium: Ugo Benzi (1376--1439)	5	(3)
The history of surgery: Guy de Chauliac (1298--1368)	8	(4)
The Hippocratic oath	12	(2)
Reactions to the `French Disease' at the papal court	14	(16)
Part two -- The sick body and its healers, 1500--1700	30	(28)
Medicine: trade or profession?	30	(5)
Women practitioners: the prescriptions of Lady Grace Mildmay	35	(2)
The place of women in learned medicine: James Primrose's Popular Errours (1651)	37	(1)
Lay and learned medicine in early modern England	38	(7)
Physical appearance and the role of the barber surgeon in early modern London	45	(5)
Renaissance critiques of medicine: Pico and Agrippa	50	(6)
Cardano's description of the death of a patient	56	(2)
Part three -- The medical renaissance of the sixteenth century: Vesalius, medical humanism and bloodletting	58	(26)
Leoniceno and medical humanism at Ferrara	58	(5)
Bloodletting in Renaissance medicine	63	(4)
Attending a public dissection by Vesalius, Bologna, 1540	67	(1)
Vesalius and the anatomical renaissance	68	(8)
Vesalius, On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543)	76	(3)
Fabricius and the `Aristotle Project'	79	(5)
Part four -- Medicine and religion in sixteenth-century Europe	84	(27)
Luther and medicine	84	(2)
The church, the devil and living saints: the example of Maria Manca	86	(3)
Paracelsus on the medical benefits of travel	89	(2)
The religion of Paracelsus	91	(7)
The Christian physician in time of plague: Johan Ewich	98	(2)
Protestantism, poor relief and health care in sixteenth-century Europe	100	(7)
Rules for ministering to the sick in the Maggiore Hospital, Milan (1616)	107	(4)
Part five -- Chemical medicine and the challenge to Galenism: the legacy of Paracelsus	111	(29)
Paracelsianism in England: Richard Bostocke (1585)	111	(2)
Sanitising Paracelsus: the Paracelsian revival in Europe, 1560--1640	113	(6)
Challenging the medical status quo: the fate of Paracelsianism in France	119	(9)
Helmontianism and medical reform in Cromwellian England: Noah Biggs (1651)	128	(6)
A new threat to medical orthodoxy: the Society of Chemical Physicians (1665)	134	(3)
Defending the status quo: William Johnson and the London College of Physicians (1665)	137	(3)
Part six -- Policies of health: diseases, poverty and hospitals	140	(33)
Fighting the plague in seventeenth-century Italy	140	(6)
Plague and the poor in early modern England	146	(7)
Medical advice in time of plague: Stephen Bradwell (1636)	153	(3)
Healing the poor: hospitals in Renaissance Florence	156	(5)
Caring for the sick poor: St Bartholomew's Hospital, London (1653)	161	(2)
The establishment of the county hospital at Winchester (1736)	163	(3)
The medicalisation of the hospital in Enlightenment Edinburgh, 1750--1800: the case of Janet Williamson (1772)	166	(7)
Part seven -- New models of the body, 1600--1800	173	(30)
William Harvey and the discovery of the circulation of the blood	173	(5)
The mechanical body: Descartes on digestion	178	(2)
Debating the medical benefits of the new anatomy: Girolamo Sbaraglia versus Marcello Malpighi	180	(5)
New theories, old cures: the Newtonian medicine of George Cheyne	185	(4)
Medical knowledge, patronage and its impact on practice in eighteenth-century England	189	(9)
The popularisation of the new medical theories in the eighteenth century: the novels of Laurence Sterne	198	(5)
Part eight -- Women and medicine in early modern Europe	203	(28)
Female complaints: the flux	203	(6)
Popular and learned theories of conception in early modern Britain	209	(4)
A midwife defends her reputation: Louise Bourgeois (1627)	213	(7)
The clientele of London midwives in the second half of the seventeenth century	220	(6)
The making of the man-midwife: the impact of cultural and social change in Georgian England	226	(5)
Part nine -- The care and cure of the insane in early modern Europe	231	(25)
Madness in early modern England: the casebooks of Richard Napier	231	(10)
Melancholy: a physician's view	241	(2)
The hospitalisation of the insane in early modern Germany: Protestant Haina and Catholic Wurzburg	243	(8)
New approaches to curing the mad?: William Battie's A Treatise on Madness (1758)	251	(5)
Part ten -- War and medicine in early modern Europe	256	(26)
Medicine, surgery and warfare in sixteenth-century Europe: Ambroise Pare	256	(7)
The cause, diagnosis and treatment of scurvy: James Lind's A Treatise of the Scurvy (1753)	263	(8)
Military medicine in the eighteenth century: John Pringle's Observations on the Diseases of the Army (1764)	271	(5)
Military and naval medicine in eighteenth-century France	276	(6)
Part eleven -- Environment, health and population, 1500--1800	282	(31)
Air and good health in Renaissance medicine	282	(2)
Visiting wells and springs in Protestant Scotland	284	(2)
An account of the mineral waters of Spa (1733)	286	(2)
The commercialisation of spa waters in eighteenth-century France	288	(2)
New approaches to understanding disease: Thomas Sydenham (1624--89)	290	(3)
Medical police and the state in eighteenth-century medicine	293	(3)
Medical statistics and smallpox in the eighteenth century	296	(2)
Voltaire on smallpox inoculation	298	(2)
A newspaper account of inoculation for smallpox (1788)	300	(1)
Smallpox and inoculation in a provincial town: Luton (1788)	301	(2)
Cleanliness and the state in eighteenth-century Europe	303	(2)
The use of artificial ventilators in hospitals	305	(3)
Public health measures in Paris on the eve of the Revolution: the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents	308	(1)
Environmental medicine in late Enlightenment Europe	309	(4)
Part twelve -- European medicine in the age of colonialism	313	(33)
Ecological imperialism and the impact of Old World diseases on the Americas and Australasia	313	(5)
Health and the promotion of colonialism: Thomas Hariot (1588)	318	(2)
Medicine and acclimatisation	320	(6)
The introduction of European medicine to New Spain	326	(8)
The Europeanisation of native American remedies	334	(2)
The reception of American drugs in early modern Europe	336	(3)
Medicine and slavery	339	(3)
The survival of African medicine in the American colonies	342	(4)
Part thirteen -- Medical organisation, training and the medical marketplace in eighteenth-century Europe	346	(27)
Challenging the physicians' monopoly in London: the Rose Case (1704)	346	(2)
The Academie Royale de Chirurgie and medicine in ancien regime France	348	(5)
Medicine and the state in eighteenth-century Germany: the plight of the physicus or state-physician	353	(4)
Reforming the medical curriculum: Toulouse (1773)	357	(2)
The clinical education of the physician in late eighteenth-century France: Philippe Pinel (1793)	359	(7)
Surgical instruction in early eighteenth-century Paris	366	(2)
Popular criticism of the medical profession: Tobias Smollett's Humphry Clinker (1771)	368	(2)
Alternative therapies in Georgian England: James Graham's Celestial Bed	370	(3)
Index	373