The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century

This book considers the underlying forces which helped to produce a revolution in seventeenth-century medicine. It shows how in the period between 1630 and 1730 medicine came to represent something more than a marginal activity unrelated to social and intellectual phenomena and also how it was influenced and formed by the same developments in religion, politics, science and commerce which shaped the general history of the seventeenth century. In an attempt to divert the historiography of the subject away from Newton, natural philosophy and the 'scientific revolution', the essays in this volume not only place medicine into a 'context' of political, religious and social change but also explore the dynamics which fashioned the nature of medicine in the age of revolution. Not surprisingly, religion emerges as perhaps the greatest external force for change, colouring most aspects of national and local life and interacting with the growth in the extent of medical knowledge and practice.

Introduction; 1. Medicine, religion and the puritan revolution Peter Elmer; 2. Harvey in Holland: circulation and the Calvinists Roger French; 3. The matter of souls: medical theory and theology in seventeenth-century England John Henry; 4. Mental illness, magical medicine and the Devil in northern England, 1650–1700 David Harley; 5. Passions and the ghost in the machine: or what not to ask about science in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany Johanna Geyer-Kordesch; 6. Thomas Sydenham: epidemics, experiment and the `Good Old Cause' Andrew Cunningham; 7. The medico-religious universe of an early eighteenth-century Parisian doctor: the case of Philippe Hecquet L. W. B Brockliss; 8. Isaac Newton, George Cheyne and the Principia Medicinae Anita Guerrini; 9. Physicians and the new philosophy: Henry Stubbe and the virtuosi-physicians Harold J. Cook; 10. The early Royal Society and the spread of medical knowledge Roy Porter; 11. Medical practice in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England: continuity and union Andrew Wear.

This book considers the underlying forces which helped to produce a revolution in seventeenth-century medicine. It shows how in the period between 1630 and 1730 medicine came to represent something more than a marginal activity unrelated to social and intellectual phenomena.