The Dying and the Doctors: The Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England

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 eighteenth century. Drawing on more than eighteen thousand probate accounts, it identifies massive increases in the consumption of medicines and medical advice by all social groups and in almost all areas. Most importantly, it examines the role of the towns in providing medical services to rural areas and hinterlands (using Canterbury as a particular focus), and demonstrates the extending ranges of physicians', surgeons' and apothecaries' businesses. It also identifies a comparable revolution in community nursing, from its unskilled status in 1600 to a more exclusive one by 1700. Thus this book describes not only a medical revolution in terms of the increased supply and demand of medical goods and services, but a medical revolution in religious terms too, in which whole communities' hopes for physical survival shifted from God to the professional medical practitioner. This, it is suggested, is one of the most profound revolutions that humanity has experienced.