Harold J. Cook

Good advice and little medicine: the professional authority of early modern english physicians

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 ] Shakespeares 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.

Borderlands: a historian's perspective on medical humanities in the US and the UK

![Graphic][1] Medical Humanities has developed as an important pedagogical ideal, although it is not a research field, at least not yet. Anyone with clinical, administrative, or personal responsibilities for other people is well aware of a duty of care requiring judgement. Judgement is an attribute applying as much to values as to knowledge, an ability to take appropriate decisions attuned to circumstances of person, context and moment. What one knows and has experienced provides a necessary foundation for deciding a course of action. And when patterns repeat themselves again and again, judgements can become routine. But because judgement is in the end about what best course of action to follow on particular occasions for particular people, general rules and universal truths can ever only be important helps, never giving determinative answers about how to act. Put another way, judgement is not about drawing conclusions but deciding what to do. The duty of care requires the practitioner to decide not what is true but what is best, and with the views of those under care taken into consideration, too.1 The complexities and ambiguities of the human condition, then, inform medicine profoundly, and exploring them often goes by the term ‘medical humanities’. Given that the subject is aimed at forming good judgement rather than informing the content of any particular field of knowledge, the medical humanities can have no unified research programme. Its advocates share an understandable concern about the potential narrowness of medical education and training, which is a special problem for young men and women who have not otherwise been exposed to a breadth of human experience. While this has been felt most keenly in the large university medical schools of the post war USA, the recent amalgamation of medical schools in Britain and the consequent routinisation of education for … [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif

Body and Passions: Materialism and the Early Modern State

A group of works written in the mid-seventeenth-century Netherlands shows many defenders of commerce and republicanism embracing some of the most unsettling tenets of the new and experimental philosophy. Their political arguments were based on a view consonant with Cartesianism, in which the body and its passions for the most part dominate reason, instead of the prevailing idea that reason could and should dominate the passions and through them the body. These arguments were in turn related to some of the new claims about the body that flowed from recent anatomical investigations, in a time and place comfortable with materialism. If ever there were a group of political theorists who grounded their views on contemporary science, this is it: Johann de Witt, the brothers De la Court, and Spinoza. They believed that the new philosophy showed it was unnatural and impoverishing to have a powerful head of state, natural and materially progressive to allow the self-interested pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

Early research on the biological effects of microwave radiation: 1940-1960

Two overriding considerations shaped the development of early research on the biological effects of microwave radiation?possible medical application (diathermy) and uncertainty about the hazards of exposure to radar. Reports in the late 1940s and early 1950s of hazards resulting from microwave exposure led to the near abandonment of medical research related to microwave diathermy at the same time that military and industrial concern over hazards grew, culminating in the massive research effort known as ?the Tri-Service program? (1957?1960). Both the early focus on medical application and the later search for hazards played important roles in dictating how this field of research developed as a science.

MARKETS AND CULTURES: MEDICAL SPECIFICS AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF THE BODY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

The history of the body is of course contested territory. Postmodern interpretations in particular have moved it from a history of scientific knowledge of its structure and function toward histories of the various meanings, identities and experiences constructed about it. Underlying such interpretations have been large and important claims about the unfortunate consequences of the rise of a political economy associated with capitalism and medicalisation. In contradistinction, this paper offers a view of that historical process in a manner in keeping with materialism rather than in opposition to it. To do so, it examines a general change in body perceptions common to most of the literature: a shift from the body as a highly individualistic and variable subject to a more universal object, so that alterations in one persons body could be understood to represent how alterations in other human bodies occurred. It then suggests that one of the chief causes of that change was the growing vigour of the market for remedies that could be given to anyone, without discrimination according to temperament, gender, ethnicity, social status or other variables in the belief that they would cure quietly and effectively. One of the most visible remedies of this kind was a ‘specific’, the Peruvian, or Jesuits’ bark. While views about specific drugs were contested, the development of a market for medicinals that worked universally helped to promote the view that human bodies are physiologically alike.

Sir John Colbatch and Augustan medicine: Experimentalism, character and entrepreneurialism

Summary The medical career of Sir John Colbatch illuminates some of the ways in which experimental philosophy, social change, and medical entrepreneurialism together helped bring about the end of the old medical regime in England. Colbatchs career in Augustan England depended very much on a growing public culture in which the well-to-do decided matters of intellectual importance for themselves, becoming increasingly free not only from the clerics but from the physicians. In this new world, debates about the fundamental principles of the new science took place increasingly in public, and in the English language, without the learned men of the university being able to enforce their authority. It gave people like Colbatch a new opportunity to make their way into the medical establishment.

The History of Medicine and the Scientific Revolution

The “new philosophy” of the seventeenth century has continued to be explained mainly on its own terms: as a major philosophical turn. Twentieth-century modernism gave pride of place to big ideas and reinforced the tendency to explain the rise of science in light of new ideas. Such orientations subordinated medicine (and technology) to sciences that appeared to be more theoretical. In attempts to persuade historians of science of the importance of medicine, then, many authors took an approach arguing that the major changes in the history of medicine during the so-called scientific revolution arose from philosophical commitments. Yet because medicine is also intimately connected to other aspects of life, its histories proved to be recalcitrant to such reductions and so continue to offer many possibilities for those who seek fresh means to address histories of body and mind united rather than divided.

What stays constant at the heart of medicine

There is no one division of medicine by which we know and another by which we act

Moving About and Finding Things Out: Economies and Sciences in the Period of the Scientific Revolution

One of the most common arguments about science is that it leads to economic development; it is also commonly argued that the rise of science was a critical factor in the rise of the modern economy. This article explores that theme from the viewpoint of the history of northwestern Europe in the early modern period, arguing that rather than either “economy” or “science” producing the other, they were coproduced. Institutional forms of organization employed by the urban elite to manage their affairs came to place a high value on descriptive matters of fact, which became the chief matters of exchange in their efforts toward both material betterment and reliable knowledge. In giving pride of place to matters of fact in their knowledge systems, which moved relatively easily across cultural boundaries, it also became possible for urban leaders to imagine a universal form of knowledge, which we often call science.

Victories for Empiricism, Failures for Theory: Medicine and Science in the Seventeenth Century

For millennia, learned physicians tried to develop theoretical principles that would guide their therapeutic actions. The most enduring foundations were built on the discourse of the four elements, four qualities, four humours, six non-naturals, and the ways these combined to yield individual temperaments and constitutions. As these fundamentals came under attack in the seventeenth century, empiricism and medical specifics once again seemed the best method of finding certainty in therapy. This was no simple change in “method” proposed by the learned, however, since the developing medical marketplace gave empirics many new opportunities for promoting their views and forcing the rest to take account of them. Does this transition in medicine also apply to “science” more generally, giving prominence to those “matters of fact” that have gained our attention in recent years? The case is made for answering “yes.”