If one looks at changes in perceptions of nature through the eyes of physicians, several fundamental themes stand out when considering the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Physicians were a highly literate group who expressed themselves on paper while also exhibiting great sensitivity to changes in both the science and the art of their discipline. They were educated in one of the three higher university faculties that awarded a doctorate (the others being law and theology). When those holding the medical doctorate (M. D.) referred to themselves as physicians, they were associating themselves with the study of nature, because the word for nature is Latinized from the Greek word for nature, physis, like our modern “physics” (see Blair, Chapter 17, this volume). Most universities had therefore accepted “physic” as one of the three higher faculties because of the argument that the science of physic was worthy of academic study even if the art of medicine was not. As Aristotle had put it, insofar as physic was a science, it “does not theorize about the individual but the class of phenomena.” Moreover, as Aristotle had also made clear, the rigorous generalizations of science were related to causal reasoning: That is, in its scientific aspects, physic offered not only generalizable but also causal explanations. It was the certainty of causal natural explanation that made physic a science.

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the science of physic had been fundamentally altered. When the eminent physician Samuel Garth (1661–1719) addressed his colleagues in honor of the famous William Harvey (1578–1657) and spoke about their common profession of “physick,” he revealed a view quite different from Aristotle’s.