Early Modern medical practitioners and military hospitals

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hazard
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Military Hospitals

scholarly journals Diocesan Licensing and Medical Practitioners in South-West England, 1660–1780

2004 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Mortimer
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Specific Context ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Medical Expertise ◽  
North West ◽  
The North ◽  
Decentralized Trade ◽  
South West ◽  
The Many ◽  
South West England

The licensing of provincial surgeons and physicians in the post-Restoration period has proved an awkward subject for medical historians. It has divided writers between those who regard the possession of a local licence as a mark of professionalism or proficiency, those who see the existence of diocesan licences as a mark of an essentially unregulated and decentralized trade, and those who discount the distinction of licensing in assessing medical expertise availability in a given region. Such a diversity of interpretations has meant that the very descriptors by which practitioners were known to their contemporaries (and are referred to by historians) have become fragmented and difficult to use without a specific context. As David Harley has pointed out in his study of licensed physicians in the north-west of England, “historians often define eighteenth-century physicians as men with medical degrees, thus ignoring … the many licensed physicians throughout the country”. One could similarly draw attention to the inadequacy of the word “surgeon” to cover licensed and unlicensed practitioners, barber-surgeons, Company members in towns, self-taught practitioners using surgical manuals, and procedural specialists whose work came under the umbrella of surgery, such as bonesetters, midwives and phlebotomists. Although such fragmentation of meaning reflects a diversity of practices carried on under the same occupational descriptors in early modern England, the result is an imprecise historical literature in which the importance of licensing, and especially local licensing, is either ignored as a delimiter or viewed as an inaccurate gauge of medical proficiency.

The Doctor’s Daughter

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Mitchell Sommers
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
The Public ◽  
Early Modern Medicine ◽  
Patent Medicine ◽  
A Share

A great deal can be learned about the patent medicine business from the lengths to which people went to secure possession of a share of the market. Several key official documents allow us to examine in some detail the public squabble between his daughter Urania Sibly and his partner Charles Wilson Saffell. Urania Sibly’s central role in the Solar Tincture business is additionally interesting because the literature of early modern medicine in Britain so seldom discusses women’s activities either as medical practitioners or independent purveyors of proprietary nostrums. Urania, however, emerges as an active and unique agent—suing for money left her in her father’s will, and when she did not get it, going into the Solar Tincture business herself. She manufactured it from 1803 until shortly before her death in 1878, at age ninety-six.

‘A Dose of Physick’: Medical Practice and Confessional Identity within the Household

2014 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 282-293
Author(s):  
Sophie Mann
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Medical Practices ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Family ◽  
Confessional Identity

In early modern England the place where most people experienced and treated illness was the home. Medical practices were therefore invariably centred on the family, and in many cases, sufferers diagnosed and nursed their ailments without seeking advice from a practitioner, instead favouring the counsel of a family member or friend. Centred on the personal transactions between patients, kin, neighbours, and in some cases a practitioner, how might the religiously plural context of the Reformation era have shaped these close social relationships? The subjects of this study belonged to two Catholic families: Nicholas Blundell (1669–1737) of Little Crosby in Lancashire, and Catharine Burton (1668–1714) of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Focusing on the sickness experiences, lay healing practices and medical treatment described at length in their diaries, this essay asks three central questions. First, in what ways did confessionally opposed families integrate or separate from one another in relation to matters of health? Second, did these subjects forge more exclusive ties with medical practitioners of their own confession, or, conversely, did they find a way to coexist comfortably with, and interact in, the ‘medical marketplace’? Third, by examining the practices through which religion and medicine interrelated within the household, I aim to challenge longstanding assumptions concerning the progressive ‘secularization’ or ‘medicalization’ of the sickbed. I hope to shed fresh light on the ways in which medical practices were embedded in social relations and community experiences; and to begin to unravel some of the complex channels through which confessional identity was experienced and expressed in relation to healing.

“Ye Lovers of Physick, come lend me your Ear”: Dangerous Doctors in Early Modern London

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jillian Linster
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Title Page ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Early Modern London ◽  
Thomas Browne ◽  
Textual Records

The highly recognizable title-page illustration from Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus was also used in the printing of a ballad to commemorate the death of “Doctor” John Lambe in 1628. This paper explores rhetorical, historical, visual, and bibliographic connections between the two works as well as the cultural significance of their relationship and the stories they tell, which are fraught with warnings regarding the inherent dangers of magic practiced by purported healers. The correspondence of the ballad and the play highlights challenges and changes in the medical marketplace of early modern London, demonstrating the complexity and consequence of the connections among historical events, textual records, and fictional literary representations. Finally, comparing the shared woodcut with an engraved frontispiece from a book written by a more reputable physician, Sir Thomas Browne, traces the rise of more trustworthy medical practitioners in mid-seventeenth-century England.

Good Advice and Little Medicine: The Professional Authority of Early Modern English Physicians

1994 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold J. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Medical Profession ◽  
Line Strength ◽  
The Body ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Professional Authority ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
Good Advice

Henry:Then you perceive the body of our kingdom, How foul it is;What rank diseases grow, and with what danger, near the heart of it.Warwick:It is but body, yet distempered, Which to his formerStrength may be restored with good advise and little medicine.[Shakespeare,Henry IV]Shakespeare's words remind us that in the learned traditions of Renaissance Europe, good advice remained more important than potent medicines for restoring both physical and political states to their previous strengths. As the lord advised the king, so a physician advised his patient, or lawyer his client, or minister his flock: preventing troubles was worth far more than cure, and the best remedy even when matters went wrong was good advice on how to return to a state of harmony. Still, plenty of quacks in politics and medicine, law and church, advocated strong measures, not helping people to live in accordance with their world but attempting to alter the conditions under which they lived. Bad advice and powerful remedies seemed to be everywhere, trampling good council and temperate behavior. The connections between learning and authority that lay behind claims to authority in general are especially well illuminated by the ways in which the physicians argued for possessing, maintaining, and extending their professional privileges.Among all the number and variety of medical practitioners in early modern England, one small group self-consciously considered itself to be professional: the physicians. As one of the three learned professions surviving from the Middle Ages, the “medical profession” has been a crucial test case for various definitions of what a profession is or was.

The Triumph of Theriac

Nuncius ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 431-470
Author(s):  
Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Common Drug ◽  
The Social ◽  
Distinct Sequence ◽  
Medical Treatises

Abstract A survey of early modern texts whose titles include the terms theriac and mithridate reveals over 500 publications printed across Europe between 1497 and 1800. These texts present a distinct sequence of medical genres: most of the early theriac-related texts were medical treatises for medical practitioners written by physicians and scholars. Later, apothecaries issued theriac-related publications for lay audiences. Theriac underwent a slow transition from being the object of scientific study to a common drug consumed by patients across the social spectrum. I argue that such theriac-related apothecary publications were fundamental components in the commodification of theriac. My analysis of these publications—especially formulas, virtues, and celebrations—shows that apothecaries reinterpreted and disseminated scholarly medical knowledge, thereby granting lasting visibility to theriac and mithridate.

“Printed follyes”: Mountebanks and the Performance of Ambivalence within the Archive

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-531
Author(s):  
Sarah Mayo
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Multiple Roles ◽  
Medical Services ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Regulatory Authorities

This article analyzes the ability of archival resources to make the especially transient and unstable performances of early modern mountebanks accessible and meaningful for performance studies research. Because mountebanks were itinerant performers and medical practitioners whose multiple roles challenged regulatory authorities and generated few lasting records, this article argues that mountebank performances may be best recovered and accessed by approaching the available archival materials not as records of fact, but of function. Documents like handbills associated with mountebanks were, after all, functional, inviting their readers to witness performances and test medical services. Self-authored documents like bills as well as representational and fictional texts replicate and reenact performative strategies attributed to mountebanks, namely, the cultivation of ambivalent rhetoric and compulsion to independent judgment of truth.

European Theories and Local Therapies: Mordexi and Galenism in the East Indies, 1500-1700

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 121-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi Hausse
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Conceptual Frameworks ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Local Disease

Abstract This article examines written accounts of the disease mordexi roughly between 1500 and 1700 to explore the conceptual frameworks and rhetorical strategies used by early modern authors to understand and present a local disease encountered in the East Indies to European readers. Europeans understood mordexi within a framework of Galenic medicine that both normalized the tropical affliction and distinguished it from other diseases. The cause and prevention of the disease were likewise explained through the effects of local flora and climate on the body. Native treatments for mordexi, however, did not fit so easily within Hippocratic-Galenic notions of restoring humoral balance and even challenged the superiority of European medical practitioners. The article concludes that the rhetorical strategies used by European authors to convey the efficacy of native healing practices point to the limitations of a Galenic framework and how writers worked around these conceptual limits.

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