INTRODUCTION

To argue that medicine did not change, or changed slowly, in the second half of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century may appear perverse. After all, as the chapters in this book demonstrate, change was taking place all around medicine and moreover, the institutions and groupings within medicine were changing. But what of medical practice? Here also the different medical sects, the Galenists, Paracelsians, empiricists, chemists, iatrochemists, iatromathematicians had their own particular theories and remedies. Yet there was underlying unity that implied a lack of change both in medical theory and practice. This unity was the consequence of a need by medical practitioners to be understood by patients, to relate to their expectations and hence to attract their trade. Commerce, in other words, could transcend apparent theoretical or institutional differences.

MEDICAL THEORY

It appears obvious that medicine changed radically in this period. The chemical, corpuscular, experimental and mathematical developments in science came to be united in different ways to provide new theoretical bases for medicine. The non-mathematical, non-mechanical, qualitative–humoral system of the ancients seems to have been replaced.