Soul-sick stomachs, distempered bodies, and divine physicians: Morality and the growth of the English medical profession
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Description
Historians studying healing in the seventeenth century have concluded that there was no formalized medical profession in that century 1, yet by the end of the eighteenth century, a new standard caregiver of the sick had taken hold: the university-educated physician.2 This new breed was more educated, respected, and autonomous than healers of past centuries. Although the rise of the profession of medicine and the medical man has been well documented, historians have not explained why people increasingly enlisted the services of licensed practitioners. This dissertation will examine one crucial but under-analyzed aspect of illness and its treatment: the moral dimension, to argue that religious attitudes and beliefs played a vital role in society's conception of illness and the options available to alleviate suffering In early modern England, bodily health and the health of one's soul were inexorably entwined. It was therefore imperative that physicians be seen as capable of caring for both in order to be trusted with the whole health of the individual. Their ability to embrace the nexus of physical and spiritual health is what began to set the learned physician apart from all other types of healers over the course of the seventeenth century. They were able to combine the legacy of their university training with an emerging sense that their skills were ordained by God to cure disease, particularly those considered punishment for sin, in order to present themselves as protectors of a bodily health that was dependent on both physical and spiritual wellness In a society in which disease was largely interpreted in terms of moral agency, and the physical and spiritual world were so intimately connected, the responsibility of caring for the entire patient, both body and soul, was a matter of public trust. To assume such trust required the highest degree of moral authority, a trait which physicians argued was connected to being learned. Their ability to convince the public of their moral authority is what ultimately proved to be their most powerful weapon against lay and popular healers at a time when there were so many other viable options for health care 1Margaret Pelling, The Common Lot: Sickness, Medical Occupations and the Urban Poor in Early Modern England (New York: Longman, 1998), 244. Similar notions have been expressed by Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience 1650-1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 1988) and Lucinda Beier, 'In Sickness and in Health: A Seventeenth Century Family's Experience,' in Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4-5. 2The group of medical men upon which this dissertation focuses are those who were considered in the seventeenth century to be 'learned physicians,' meaning they had earned university degrees in medicine, either in England or on the Continent. Such individuals were a fairly new group in England, the product of what Harold Cook has termed the intellectual and educational changes of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They are not necessarily fellows, licentiates, or even extra-licentiates of the College of Physicians, as this would restrict the group to a scant number. They are, moreover, individuals who considered themselves to be medical professionals, rather than those who merely dabbled in or 'topped off' their salaries through medicine