Article contents
Good Advice and Little Medicine: The Professional Authority of Early Modern English Physicians
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2014
Extract
- 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 former
- Strength 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.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1994
References
1 Some of the major studies include Freidson, Eliot, Profession of Medicine: A Study of the Sociology of Applied Knowledge (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1974)Google Scholar; Berlant, J., Profession and Monopoly: A Study of Medicine in the United States and Great Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975)Google Scholar; Parry, Noel and Parry, Jose, The Rise of the Medical Profession: A Study of Collective Social Mobility (London: Croom Helm, 1976)Google Scholar. Among the major sociological studies of the professions in general, see Carr-Saunders, A. M. and Wilson, P. A., The Professions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933)Google Scholar; Reader, William J., Professional Men (London, 1966)Google Scholar; Vollmer, Howard M. and Mills, Donald L., eds., Professionalization (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966)Google Scholar; Parsons, Talcott, “Professions,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. Sills, David (New York, 1968), 12:536–47Google Scholar; Johnson, Terence James, Profession and Power (London: Macmillan, 1972)Google Scholar; Freidson, Eliot, Professional Powers: A Study of the Institutionalization of Formal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar. For critiques of the dominant sociological view, see Haskell, Thomas L., “Professionalism versus Capitalism: R. H. Tawney, Emile Durkheim, and C. S. Peirce on the Disinterestedness of Professional Communities,” in The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory, ed. Haskell, Thomas L. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984), pp. 180–225Google Scholar; and Klegon, Douglas, “The Sociology of the Professions: An Emerging Perspective,” Sociology of Work and Occupations 5 (1978): 259–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also Prest, Wilfred, “Introduction,” in The Professions in Early Modern England, ed. Prest, Wilfred (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 1–24Google Scholar.
2 Among those who implicitly or explicitly argue for continuity, see Bullough, Vern L., The Development of Medicine as a Profession: The Contribution of the Medieval University to Modern Medicine (New York: Karger, 1966)Google Scholar; Clark, George N., A History of the Royal College of Physicians of London, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964–1966)Google Scholar; Cipolla, Carlo M., Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; García-Ballester, Luis, McVaugh, Michael R., and Rubio-Vela, Augustín, Medical Licensing and Learning in Fourteenth-Century Valencia, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 79, pt. 6 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1989)Google Scholar. Also see Léonard, Jacques, “La restauration et la profession médicale,” in La médicalisation de la société française, 1770–1830, ed. Goubert, J.-P. (Waterloo, Ontario: Historical Reflections Press, 1982), pp. 69–81Google Scholar; Frijhoff, Willem, “‘Non satis dignitatis …’: Overde maatschappelijke status van geneeskundigen tijdens de republiek,” Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 96 (1983): 379–406Google Scholar, “Wetenschap, beroep en status ten tijde van de republiek: De intellectueel,” Tijdschrift voor de geschiedenis der geneeskunde, natuurwetenschappen, wiskunde, en techniek 6 (1983): 18–30Google Scholar.
3 For a recent review and defense of the association between the industrial revolution and “professional society,” see Perkin, Harold, Professionalism, Property and English Society since 1880 (Reading: University of Reading, 1981)Google Scholar, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 1–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many of those who have examined the history of the professions on the Continent have raised reservations about this periodization: Cipolla, Carlo M., “The Professions: The Long View,” Journal of European Economic History 2 (1973): 37–52Google Scholar; Gelfand, Toby, Professionalizing Modern Medicine: Paris Surgeons and Medical Science and Institutions in the Eighteenth Century (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1980)Google Scholar; Geison, Gerald L., ed., Professions and the French State, 1700–1900 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ramsey, Matthew, Professional Power and Popular Medicine in France, 1770–1830: The Social World of Medical Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
4 Charlton, K., “The Professions in Sixteenth Century England,” University of Birmingham Historical Journal 12 (1969): 20–41Google Scholar; Holmes, Geoffrey, Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680–1730 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982)Google Scholar; O'Day, Rosemary, “The Professions in Early Modern England,” History Today 36 (1986): 52–54Google Scholar; Earle, Peter, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (London: Methuen, 1989), pp. 60–75Google Scholar; Prest, ed., Professions.
5 This is particularly true of Holmes, Augustan England; Earle, Making of the English Middle Class; and for several of the articles in Prest, ed., Professions.
6 Quotation from Pelling, Margaret, “Medical Practice in Early Modern England: Trade or Profession?” in Prest, , ed., Professions, pp. 90–128Google Scholar, quote on p. 91. Also see Prest, Wilfred, “Occupational Diversity: Barber-Surgeons and the Trades of Norwich, 1550–1640,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 56 (1982): 484–511Google Scholar, “Tradition and Diversity: Medical Practice in Norwich, 1550–1640,” Scienze credenze occulte livelli di cultura (Firenze: Olschki, 1982), pp. 159–71Google Scholar, “Appearance and Reality: Barber-Surgeons, the Body and Disease,” in London, 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis, ed. Beier, L. and Finlay, R. (London, 1986), pp. 82–112Google Scholar.
7 Beier, Lucinda McCray, Sufferers and Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 255Google Scholar.
8 The number of members of the College of Physicians of London of all ranks remained about one for every 4,000 or 4,500 Londoners throughout the seventeenth century (Cook, Harold J., The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986], pp. 76, 275Google Scholar); this compares with estimates of all medical practitioners to total London population of about 1:400 (Pelling, Margaret and Webster, Charles, “Medical Practitioners,” in Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Webster, Charles [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979], pp. 166, 186, 188Google Scholar). Consequently, many historians have discounted the significance of institutional affiliation of the different medical practitioners in favor of treating them as individuals: see, e.g., Porter, Roy, ed., Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-industrial Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar, Porter, Roy, Health for Sale: Quackery in England, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Porter, Dorothy and Porter, Roy, Patient's Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.
9 See, e.g., Hexter, J. H., “The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance,” Journal of Modern History 22 (1950): 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Siegel, P. N., “English Humanism and the New Tudor Aristocracy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 4 (1952): 450–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caspari, F., Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954)Google Scholar; Ferguson, Arthur B., The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Dowling, Maria, Humanism in the Age of Henry VIII (London: Croom Helm, 1985)Google Scholar.
10 On the political and moral foundations of the arguments over monopoly, see Sacks, David Harris, “Parliament, Liberty, and the Commonweal,” in Parliament and Liberty from Queen Elizabeth I to the Civil Wars, ed. Hexter, J. H. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 85–121Google Scholar.
11 Plucknett, T. F. T., “Bonham's Case and Judicial Review,” Harvard Law Review 40 (1926): 30–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thome, S. E., “Dr. Bonham's Case,” Law Quarterly Review 54 (1938): 543–52Google Scholar; Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 177Google Scholar; Berger, Raoul, “Doctor Bonham's Case: Statutory Construction or Constitutional Theory?” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 117 (1969): 521–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gray, Charles M., “Bonham's Case Reviewed,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 116 (1972): 35–58Google ScholarPubMed; and Cook, Harold J., “‘Against Common Right and Reason’: The College of Physicians against Dr. Thomas Bonham,” American Journal of Legal History 29 (1985): 301–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Slack, Paul, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), esp. pp. 225Google Scholar, 200. On foreign precedents for physicians advising on plague orders, see Palmer, Richard, “Physicians and the State in Postmediaeval Italy,” in The Town and State Physician in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, ed. Russell, Andrew W. (Wolfenbiittel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 1981), pp. 47–61Google Scholar; Cipolla, Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance (n. 2 above); Carmichael, Ann, “Plague Legislation in the Italian Renaissance: An Alternative View,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 57 (1983): 508–25Google Scholar. On foreign precedents for a College of Physicians, see Whitteridge, G., “Some Italian Precursors of the Royal College of Physicians,” Journal of the Royal College of Physicians London 12 (1977): 67–80Google ScholarPubMed; Webster, Charles, “Thomas Linacre and the Foundation of the College of Physicians,” in Essays on the Life of Thomas Linacre, c. 1460–1524, ed. Maddison, Francis, Pelling, Margaret, and Webster, Charles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 198–222Google Scholar.
13 “An Acte Concerning Phisicions,” 14 & 15 Hen. VIII, c. 5. The act not only confirmed the king's charter but said that the bishops could not license physicians in their dioceses unless those physicians had been examined and approved by the college in London, with the exception of Oxford and Cambridge graduates—a provision never enforced.
14 “Concerning Phisicians,” 32 Hen. VIII, c. 40. The so-called Quacks Charter of 1542–43, concerning all men and women with a “knowledge of the nature kinde and operacion of certeyne herbs rotes and waters, and the using and mynistering of them to suche as been pained with customable diseases,” protected them not from the supervision of the physicians but only from the suits and “vexations” of the surgeons: “An Acte that persones being no commen Surgeons maie mynistre medicines owtwarde,” 34 & 35 Hen. VIII c. 8.
15 Annales Collegii Medicorum, 1541, Royal College of Physicians, London, 1:4aGoogle Scholar (1541) (hereafter cited as Annals). My thanks to the Royal College of Physicians of London for permission to quote from their records.
16 Ibid., 1:6b (1552).
17 “An Acte touching thincorporations of the Phisitions in London,” 1 Mariae, St. 2, c. 9.
18 The “privilege” is mentioned as a precedent in 1626/7; see Annals, 3:70aGoogle Scholar.
19 Annals, 2:149a–50a, 155b–57aGoogle Scholar; Clark (n. 2 above), pp. 1:150–85; Cook, , “‘Against Common Right and Reason,’” pp. 305–7Google Scholar.
20 2 Brownlow and Goldesborough, 259, English Reports, 123:930Google Scholar.
21 Sacks (n. 10 above); see Wagner, D. O., “Coke and the Rise of Economic Liberalism,” Economic History Review 6 (1935—1936): 30–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “The Common Law and Free Enterprise,” Economic History Review 7 (1936–1937): 217–20Google Scholar; Hill, Christopher, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 225–65Google Scholar; Malament, Barbara, “The ‘Economic Liberalism’ of Sir Edward Coke,” Yale Law Journal 76 (1967): 1321–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hexter, J. H., “Property, Monopoly, and Shakespeare's Richard II,” in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Zagorin, Perez (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 1–24Google Scholar; and esp. White, Stephen, Sir Edward Coke and ‘The Grievances of the Commonwealth,’ 1621–1628 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), pp. 86–141Google Scholar. As White points out, the question was not so much whether monopolies were good or bad as what constituted a “monopoly” (pp. 118–19).
22 2 Brownlow and Goldesborough, 264, English Reports, 123:933Google Scholar. Also see the slightly different revision of Coke's words given in Gray (n. 11 above), pp. 39–40.
23 2 Brownlow and Goldesborough, 262, English Reports, 123:932Google Scholar.
24 See esp. Edelstein, Ludwig, “The Dietetics of Antiquity,” in his Ancient Medicine, ed. Temkin, Owsei and Temkin, C. Lilian, trans. Temkin , C. Lilian (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 303–16Google Scholar; Temkin, Owsei, “Medicine and the Problem of Moral Responsibility,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 23 (1949): 1–20Google ScholarPubMed, esp. 4–7.
25 Niebyl, Peter H., “Sennert, Van Helmont, and Medical Ontology,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 45 (1971): 115–37Google Scholar. Niebyl points out that the charge of Manaceanism was leveled at the Paracelcians by Dr. Thomas Erastus, who clearly saw the political and religious implications in the new ideas.
26 Allen, Phyllis, “Medical Education in Seventeenth Century England,” Journal of the History of Medicine 1 (1946): 115–43Google Scholar; Frank, Robert G. Jr., “Science, Medicine and the Universities of Early Modern England: Background and Sources,” History of Science 11 (1973): 194–216, 239–69CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. The clinical experience of English physicians was obtained through apprenticeship and doing, just like that of other practitioners. On the beginnings of clinical teaching in sixteenth-century Padua and seventeenth-century Leiden, see Bylebyl, Jerome J., “The School of Padua: Humanistic Medicine in the Sixteenth Century,” in Webster, , ed. (n. 8 above), pp. 335–70Google Scholar, “Medicine, Philosophy, and Humanism in Renaissance Italy,” in Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, ed. Shirley, John W. and Hoeniger, F. David (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1985), pp. 27–49Google Scholar; Beukers, Harm, “Clinical Teaching in Leiden from Its Beginning until the End of the Eighteenth Century,” Clio Medica 21 (1987/1988): 139–52Google ScholarPubMed.
27 See, e.g., Hall, Thomas S., “Idiosyncrasy: Greek Medical Ideas of Uniqueness,” Sudhoffs Archiv 58 (1974): 283–302Google ScholarPubMed; Siraisi, Nancy, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 For some observations on the connections between wisdom, judgment, and advice, see van den Berg, Jan Hendrick, The Changing Nature of Man: Introduction to a Historical Psychology (Metabletica), trans. Croes, H.F. (New York: Norton, 1961)Google Scholar.
29 Boorde, Andrewe, A Compendyous Regyment or a Dyetary of healthe made in Mountpyllyer … newly corrected and imprynted with dyvers addycyons (London, 1547)Google Scholar.
30 On the medieval ideas, see Schipperges, Heinrich, “Zur Bedeutung von ‘physica’ und zur Rolle des ‘physicus“ in der abendländischen Wissenschaftsgeschichte,” Sudhoffs Archiv 60 (1976): 354–74Google Scholar; Bylebyl, Jermore J., “The Medical Meaning of ’Physica,’” in Renaissance Medical Learning: Evolution of a Tradition, ed. McVaugh, Michael R. and Siraisi, Nancy, Osiris, 2d ser., 6 (1990): 16–44Google Scholar.
31 In early modern English, “diet” still retained its Greek meaning of a regular way of life, just as a German or Japanese parliament is called a “diet” if it meets regularly. Our association of “diet” with eating, and more specifically with abstaining from food, is the last dim legacy of this more inclusive ancient notion of regulating one's life for health.
32 Elyot, Thomas, The castle of helth (London, 1541)Google Scholar, preface. For only three other examples, see Venner, Tobias, Via Recta ad Vitam Longam: or, A plaine Philosophicall demonstration of … all such things as … make for the preservation of health (London, 1628)Google Scholar; Lessius, Leonard, Hygiasticon: or, The right course of preserving Life and Health unto extream old Age, trans. H. S. (Cambridge, 1634)Google Scholar; Brugis, Thomas, The Marrow of Physicke. Or, A Learned Discourse of the severall parts of mans Body (London, 1640)Google Scholar.
33 The potentially coercive nature of medical advice has recently been emphasized by Nicholson, Malcolm in “The Metastatic Theory of Pathogenesis and the Professional Interest of the Eighteenth-Century Physician,” Medical History 32 (1988): 277–300CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 The practice of giving consilia is said to have originated with Taddeo Alderotti, who imitated the lawyers in many ways; see Siraisi, Nancy G., Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. In early modern England, these consilia most often took the form of long letters. On the importance of casuistry, see McAdoo, H. R., The Structure of Caroline Moral Theology (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1949)Google Scholar; Wood, Thomas, English Casuistical Divinity during the Seventeenth Century: With Special Reference to Jeremy Taylor (London: SPCK, 1952)Google Scholar; Leites, Edmund, ed., Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunter, Michael, “Alchemy, Magic and Moralism in the Thought of Robert Boyle,” British Journal for the History of Science 23 (1989): 387–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although not an M.D., the Reverend Napier's medical practice well represents the values of the university-trained councilor; see MacDonald, Michael, Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.
35 On the Aristotelian connection between medicine and morality, see Gracia, Diego, “The Structure of Medical Knowledge in Aristotle's Philosophy,” Sudhoffs Archiv 62 (1978): 1–36Google ScholarPubMed.
36 Securis, Iohn, A Detection and Querimoniee of the daily enormities and abuses committed in physick (London, 1566)Google Scholar, sigs. AIIr–Allv. Securis says he had studied in Paris with the great neo-Hippocratic, Sylvius; for more on this background, see Lonie, I. M., “The ‘Paris Hippocrates’: Teaching and Research in Paris in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century,” in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Wear, A., French, R. K., and Lonie, I. M. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 155–74, 318–26Google Scholar.
37 See esp. Amundsen, Darrel W., “Medical Deontology and Pestilential Disease in the Late Middle Ages,” Journal of the History of Medicine 32 (1977): 403–21Google ScholarPubMed, “Medieval Canon Law on Medical and Surgical Practice by the Clergy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 52 (1978): 22–44Google Scholar, “Casuistry and Professional Obligations: The Regulation of Physicians by the Court of Conscience in the Late Middle Ages,” Transactions and Studies, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 5th sen, 31 (1981): 22–39Google Scholar; Waddington, Ivan, “The Development of Medical Ethics: A Sociological Analysis,” Medical History 19 (1975): 36–51CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
38 For instance, there are no “ethical” rules among the statutes of the seventeenth-century London College of Physicians, but there are many long rules governing the behavior of members toward one another and toward outsiders; the statutes of the London College of Physicians are printed in Clark (n. 2 above), 1:376–417.
39 Securis, sig. Biiiiv. This is consonant with Aristotle's notions of virtue as derived from practical reason, and with contemporary Anglican notions of conscience as habits of mind; see McAdoo; Wood; Sherman, Nancy, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle's Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)Google Scholar. Paula Gottlieb points out that one of Aristotle's central “ethical” analogies is the equation between goods and healthy things; see Gottlieb, Paula, “Aristotle and Protagoras: The Good Human Being as a Measure of Goods,” Aperion 24 (1991): 25–45Google Scholar.
40 Securis, sigs. Br–Bv, Biir–Biiv.
41 For example, Coleman, William, “The People's Health: Medical Themes in Eighteenth-Century French Popular Literature,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 51 (1977): 55–74Google Scholar; cf. Coleman, William, “Health and Hygiene in the Encyclopedie: A Medical Doctrine for the Bourgeoisie,” Journal of the History of Medicine 29 (1974): 399–421Google ScholarPubMed.
42 Cotta, John, The Trial of Witch-craft, Shewing the True Methode of the Discovery: With a Confutation of Erroneous Wayes (London, 1616)Google Scholar. On his condemnation of nonphysicians, see Cotta, John, A Short Discoverie of the Unobserved Dangers of severall sorts of ignorant and unconsiderate Practisers of Physicke in England (London, 1612), pp. 100–114Google Scholar. The second edition bore the title: A True Discovery of the Empericke with the Fugitive Physition and Quacksalver … (London, 1617)Google Scholar.
43 Cotta, , Short Discoverie, p. 118Google Scholar.
44 Ibid., pp. 117–18.
45 Ibid., pp. 2–8.
46 Ibid., pp. 117–18.
47 Dunk, Eleazar, The Copy of a Letter written by E. D. Doctour of Physicke to a Gentleman, by whom it was published (London, 1606), pp. 20–21Google Scholar.
48 Ibid., p. 49.
49 For other contemporary attacks printed in London, see Forrest, Peter, The Arraingnment of Urines, trans, and epitomized by Hart, James (London, 1623)Google Scholar; Bowne, Peter, Pseudo-medicorum anatomia (London, 1624)Google Scholar; Hart, James, The Anatomie of Urines (London, 1625)Google Scholar; Brian, Thomas, The Pisse-Prophet, or, certaine pisse-pot lectures (London, 1637)Google Scholar; Primrose, James, De vulgi in medicinâ Erroribus Libri quatuor (London, 1638; trans. 1651)Google Scholar. For a discussion of the situation in France, see Lingo, Alison Klairmont, “Empirics and Charlatans of Early Modern France: The Genesis of the Classification of the ‘Other’ in Medical Practice,” Journal of Social History 19 (1986): 583–603CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
50 S. W., An Examination of a Late Treatise of the Gout (London, 1698)Google Scholar, preface. For midcentury examples, see the work of Hill, Christopher, “The Medical Profession and Its Radical Critics,” in his Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 157–78Google Scholar; Rattansi, P. M., “The Helmontian-Galenist Controversy in Restoration England,” Ambix 12 (1964): 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Webster, Charles, “English Medical Reformers of the Puritan Revolution: A Background to the ‘Society of Chymical Physitians,’” Ambix 14 (1967): 16–41CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes & Meyer, 1975), pp. 256 ff.Google Scholar
51 On the importance of the pastorate, see O'Day, Rosemary, The English Clergy: The Emergence and Consolidation of a Profession, 1558–1642 (Woking: Leicester University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, “The Anatomy of a Profession: The Clergy of the Church of England,” in Prest, , ed., Professions (n. 1 above), pp. 25–63Google Scholar; Herbert, George, The Priest to the Temple, or, The Country Parson his Character, and Rule of Holy Life (London, 1652)Google Scholar. For a different view, see Pruett, John H., The Parish Clergy under the Later Stuarts: The Leicestershire Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978)Google Scholar; on medieval notions, see Brown, D. Catherine, Pastor and Laity in the Theology of Jean Gerson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 36–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
52 McAdoo (n. 34 above), p. 27; Wood (n. 34 above), p. 5.
53 For more on the rights and responsibilities entrusted to the College of Physicians by the early Stuarts, see Cook, Harold J., “Policing the Health of London: The College of Physicians and the Early Stuart Monarchy,” Social History of Medicine 2 (1989): 1–33CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
54 Pocock, J. G. A., Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also see the provocative works of James, Mervyn E., Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Becker, Marvin B., Civility and Society in Western Europe, 1300–1600 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
55 Brewer, John, “Commercialization and Politics,” in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John, and Plumb, J. H. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 202Google Scholar. Also see Hirschman, Albert O., The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Burger, Thomas, with assistance of Lawrence, Frederick (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989)Google Scholar.
56 Weatherill, Lorna, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 119–21, 123–27, 130Google Scholar.
57 Roy Porter has recently taken up this theme with gusto; see, e.g., his “The Language of Quackery in England, 1660–1800,” in The Social History of Language, ed. Burke, Peter and Porter, Roy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 73–103Google Scholar, “Before the Fringe: ‘Quackery’ and the Eighteenth-Century Medical Market,” in Studies in the History of Alternative Medicine, ed. Cooter, Roger (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 1–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Health for Sale (n. 8 above).
58 For a further elaboration, see Cook, , Decline of the Old Medical Regime (n. 8 above), pp. 28–69Google Scholar. Published advice became more that of hygiene (good for anyone who followed the rules) than of dietetics (appropriate only for a particular person). On the literature of public hygiene, see Smith, Ginnie, “Prescribing Rules of Health: Self-Help and Advice in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Porter, , ed., Patients and Practitioners (n. 8 above), pp. 249–82Google Scholar; Hannaway, Caroline, “From Private Hygiene to Public Health: A Transformation in Western Medicine in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Public Health, ed. Ogawa, Teizo (Tokyo: Saikon, 1980), pp. 108–28Google Scholar.
59 Teigen, Philip M., “Taste and Quality in 15th- and 16th-Century Galenic Pharmacology,” Pharmacy in History 29 (1987): 60–68Google ScholarPubMed.
60 The alchemists made this so plain that C. G. Jung rooted a large body of his psychological theory in it. For a discussion of his views, see Dobbs, B. J. T., The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy; or, ‘The Hunting of the Greene Lyon’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 26–35Google Scholar; for a Jungian perspective, see Jacobi, Jolande, ed., Paracelsus: Selected Writings, 2d ed., Bollingen Series no. 28 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958)Google Scholar.
61 For recent translations of selections from Paracelsus, see Jacobi, ed.; Paracelsus: Essential Readings, ed. and trans. Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (Chatham: Crucible, 1990)Google Scholar. Among the many secondary works on medical chemistry, see Debus, Allen G., The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (New York: Science History Publications, 1977)Google Scholar; Webster, Charles, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; and Moran, Bruce T., The Alchemical World of the German Court: Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle ofMoritz of Hessen (1572–1632), Sudhoffs Archiv, Beiheft, no. 29 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991)Google Scholar.
62 For instance, O'Dowde, Thomas (The Poor Man's Physician, Or the True Art of Medicine, 3d ed. [London, 1665]Google Scholar, sig. A4V): “I scorne … the Greatest Doctor, mounted on his Asse and Footcloth, jogging on the old Road, laden with ignorance in the diviner sorts of Medicines.”
63 For example, Culpeper, Nicholas (A Physicall Directory Or a Translation of the London Dispensatory Made by the Colledge of Physicians in London [London, 1649]Google Scholar, translator's preface): “I am confident there be those in this Nation that have wit enough to know that the Papists and the Colledg of Physitians wil not suffer Divinity and Physick to be printed in our mother tongue, both upon one and the same grounds, and both colour it over with the same excuses.”
64 Kocher, Paul H., “The Physician as Athiest in Elizabethan England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 10 (1947): 229–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hunter, Michael, “The Problem of ‘Atheism’ in Early Modern England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 35 (1985): 135–57Google Scholar; Wootton, David, “Unbelief in Early Modern Europe,” History Workshop, no. 20 (1985), pp. 82–100Google Scholar.
65 See esp. Shapiro, Barbara J., Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.
66 Shapin, Steven and Schaffer, Simon, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Shapin, Steven, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England,” Isis 79 (1988): 373–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “Who Was Robert Hooke?” in Robert Hooke: New Studies, ed. Hunter, Michael and Schaffer, Simon (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1989), pp. 253–85Google Scholar; Hunter, “Alchemy, Magic and Moralism” (n. 34 above); Golinski, J. V., “A Noble Spectacle: Phosphorus and the Public Cultures of Science in the Early Royal Society,” Isis 80 (1989): 11–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Southgate, B. C., “‘Forgotten and Lost’: Some Reactions to Autonomous Science in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989): 249–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 266–67; Daston, Lorraine, “Nationalism and Scientific Neutrality under Napoleon,” in Solomon's House Revisited: The Organization and Institutionalization of Science, ed. Främgsmyr, Tore, Nobel Symposium no. 75 (New York: Science History Publications, 1990), pp. 95–119Google Scholar; and Pumfrey, Stephen, “Ideas above His Station: A Social Study of Hooke's Curatorship of Experiments,” History of Science 29 (1991): 1–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
67 Cook, Harold J., “The Society of Chemical Physicians, the New Philosophy, and the Restoration Court,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 61 (1987): 61–77Google ScholarPubMed, “Physicians and the New Philosophy: Henry Stubbe and the Virtuosi-Physicians,” in Medical Revolution in the 17th Century, ed. French, Roger and Wear, Andrew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 246–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “The New Philosophy and Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. Lindberg, David C. and Westman, Robert S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 397–436Google Scholar, and Decline of the Old Medical Regime, pp. 133–182.
68 Cook, Harold J., “Practical Medicine and the British Armed Forces after the ‘Glorious Revolution,’” Medical History 34 (1990): 1–26CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
69 “An Act for exempting Apothecaries from serving the Offices of Constable, Scavanger and other Parish and Ward Offices, and from serving upon Juries,” printed in Raithby, John, ed., The Statutes at Large, of England and of Great Britain (London, 1811), 3:367–68Google Scholar. At the same time, in Edinburgh, the surgeons began to pay taxes at the rate of professional men in 1695; see Dingwall, Helen M., “Seventeenth Century Edinburgh Surgeons: Trade or Profession?” Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh 22 (1992): 81Google ScholarPubMed.
70 Quoted from the law report of the case in 6 Modern (Mod.), 44, printed in English Reports, vol. 87. In the report of the case in 3 Salkeld, 18, English Reports, vol. 91, the jury could not decide “whether [Rose's behavior] was practising as a physician.” According to The Case of the College of Physicians London, Wherein they are Defendants (London, 1704)Google Scholar, the question was “whether the said Mr. Rose did practise Physick within the Intent of the Letters Patents and Act of Parliament.”
71 6 Modern, 44. According to the Case of the College of Physicians, the special verdict was “argued three several times.”
72 6 Modern, 44. The words of 3 Salkeld, 17, are “let the distemper be what it will, the prescribing and advising what is fit for it, is the business of a physician, though without a fee, but that rarely happens.”
73 The Manuscripts of the House of Lords, Vol. 5: 1702–1704 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1910), p. 549Google Scholar; Journals of the House of Lords (February 18, 1703/1704), 17:441Google Scholar.
74 Dodd's, plea is summarized in Observations upon the Case of William Rose an Apothecary, As represented by him To the Most Honourable House of Lords (London [printed for the College], 1704), pp. 3–6Google Scholar.
75 Manuscripts of the House of Lords, p. 549. David Sacks has pointed out to me that another difference between Bonham's case and Rose's is that the legal issue centers on an exegesis of statutory language; that is, statute was not being measured against eternal norms, but was sovereign, needing interpretation of its words alone.
76 Manuscripts of the House of Lords, p. 549.
77 Observations upon the Case of William Rose, p. 24.
78 Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners (n. 8 above).
79 Conflating the question about physic with the issue of supplying medical care to the poor, R. S. Roberts concluded that “the House of Lords gave the verdict to the apothecary, because it could no longer be denied that the Physicians' concept of what constituted medical practice did not serve the needs of the mass of the people” (Roberts, R. S., “The Personnel and Practice of Medicine in Tudor and Stuart England: Part II: London,” Medical History 8 [1964]: 229CrossRefGoogle Scholar). For more details on the Rose case, see Cook, Harold J., “The Rose Case Reconsidered: Physic and the Law in Augustan England,” Journal of the History of Medicine 45 (1990): 527–55Google Scholar.
80 Rosenberg, Albert, “The London Dispensary for the Sick-Poor,” Journal of the History of Medicine 14 (1959): 41–56Google ScholarPubMed; Ellis, Frank H., “The Background to the London Dispensary,” Journal of the History of Medicine 20 (1965): 197–212Google ScholarPubMed.
81 McKeon, Michael, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1987)Google Scholar; Watt, Ian, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964)Google Scholar; Morgan, Charlotte E., The Rise of the Novel of Manners: A Study of English Prose Fiction between 1600 and 1740 (1911; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1963)Google Scholar; Reedy, Gerard, The Bible and Reason: Anglicans and Scripture in Late Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
82 For two different examples of such physicians, see Levine, Joseph M., Doctor Woodward's Shield: History, Science and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Hone, Campbell R., The Life of Dr. John Radcliffe, 1652–1714 (London: Faber & Faber, 1950)Google Scholar.
83 Cook, Richard I., Sir Samuel Garth (Boston: Twayne, 1980)Google Scholar; Sena, John F., The Best-natured Man: Sir Samuel Garth, Physician and Poet (New York: AMS Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Booth, C. C., “Sir Samuel Garth, F. R. S.: The Dispensary Poet,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society 40 (1986): 125–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Krapp, Robert M., “Class Analysis of a Literary Controversy: Wit and Sense in Seventeenth Century English Literature,” Science and Society 10 (1946): 80–92Google Scholar; Boys, Richard C., Sir Richard Blackmore and the Wits: A Study of ‘Commendatory Verses on the Author of the Two Arthurs’ and the ‘Satyre against Wit’ (1700), University of Michigan Contributions in Modern Philology no. 13 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949)Google Scholar; Rosenberg, Albert, Sir Richard Blackmore: A Poet and Physician of the Augustan Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Solomon, Harry M., Sir Richard Blackmore (Boston: Twayne, 1980)Google Scholar.
84 Such distinctions are never sharp or entirely clear, but see Chartier, Roger, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, trans. Cochrane, Lydia G. (Oxford: Polity, 1988)Google Scholar, and esp. “From Texts to Manners, A Concept and Its Books: Civilité between Artistocratic Distinction and Popular Appropriation,” in his The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Cochrane, Lydia G. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 71–109Google Scholar. Older notions of civic virtue versus the newer virtues of commerce and manners are at the heart of Pocock's Virtue, Commerce, and History (n. 54 above). The forthcoming work of Lawrence Klein on civility in the early eighteenth century will also speak to these issues.
85 As Michael MacDonald notes, Napier “was distinctly hostile toward the Puritans' effort to transform the minister's duty to provide spiritual consolation into an obligation to convert suffering men and women to a more rigorous and saintly way of life” (Mystical Bedlam [n. 34 above], p. 223).
- 21
- Cited by