The Medical Revolution Of The Seventeenth Century

This consideration of the underlying forces which helped to produce a revolution in 17th century medicine sets out to show how, in the period between 1630 and 1730, medicine came to represent something more than a marginal activity and was influenced by the current developments of the day.

This study charts the adoption of medical strategies by the seriously ill and dying, decade by decade, from the Elizabethan age of astrological medicine to the emergence of the general practitioner in the early 18th century.

The Middle Ages marked a time when religion and superstition dominated all thinking and stalled the pursuit of new ideas. This book examines the scientific revolution and how it has affected future developments in medicine. It is suitable for readers in need of additional information on specific terms, topics, and developments in medical science.

How did 17th-century families in England perceive their health care needs? What household resources were available for medical self-help? To what extent did households make up remedies based on medicinal recipes? Drawing on previously unpublished household papers ranging from recipes to accounts and letters, this original account shows how health and illness were managed on a day-to-day basis in a variety of 17th-century households. It reveals the extent of self-help used by families, explores their favourite remedies and analyses differences in approaches to medical matters. Anne Stobart illuminates cultures of health care amongst women and men, showing how 'kitchin physick' related to the business of medicine, which became increasingly commercial and professional in the 18th century.

Developments in medicine that took place in the 1600s were heavily influenced by the religious and politico-religious upheavals in English society. This work addresses the contending approaches to medicine at a time of dynastic flux, civil war and plague.

'Medicine in an Age of Revolution' is concerned with the interaction between religion, politics, and medicine in an age of revolutionary upheaval associated with the civil wars in Britain in the mid-seventeenth century. As medical and scientific thinking underwent radical revision, its impact was keenly felt in religious and political circles.

This is a major synthesis of the knowledge and practice of early modern English medicine in its social and cultural contexts. The book vividly maps out some central areas: remedies (and how they were made credible), notions of disease, advice on preventive medicine and on healthy living, and how surgeons worked upon the body and their understanding of what they were doing. The structures of practice and knowledge examined in the first part of the book came to be challenged in the later seventeenth century, when the 'new science' began to overturn the foundation of established knowledge. However, as the second part of the book shows, traditional medical practice was so well entrenched in English culture that much of it continued into the eighteenth century. Various changes did however occur, which set the agenda for later medical treatment and which are discussed in the final chapter.

The Age of Genius explores the eventful intertwining of outward event and inner intellectual life to tell, in all its richness and depth, the story of the 17th century in Europe. It was a time of creativity unparalleled in history before or since, from science to the arts, from philosophy to politics. Acclaimed philosopher and historian A.C. Grayling points to three primary factors that led to the rise of vernacular (popular) languages in philosophy, theology, science, and literature; the rise of the individual as a general and not merely an aristocratic type; and the invention and application of instruments and measurement in the study of the natural world. Grayling vividly reconstructs this unprecedented era and breathes new life into the major figures of the seventeenth century intelligentsia who span literature, music, science, art, and philosophy--Shakespeare, Monteverdi, Galileo, Rembrandt, Locke, Newton, Descartes, Vermeer, Hobbes, Milton, and Cervantes, among many more. During this century, a fundamentally new way of perceiving the world emerged as reason rose to prominence over tradition, and the rights of the individual took center stage in philosophy and politics, a paradigmatic shift that would define Western thought for centuries to come.