INTRODUCTION

Few histories of medicine are without an evolutionary approach. Histories adopting this approach are not now generally ‘whiggish’, but they invariably give much attention to signposts indicating the direction of the road and bearing legends such as ‘mechanism’ or ‘circulation’. Many of these directional milestones are clustered in England and the United Provinces of Holland, and, even in the seventeenth century, medical mechanism could be seen by a major figure in Paris as so much modern Dutch nonsense. But as we have seen, Learned and Rational Doctors were successful in the familiar territory of traditional natural philosophy where they did not need signposts or milestones. This was mostly the case in Catholic countries such as Italy and Spain, and we have glanced at some probable religious reasons for this. In Spain in particular, the universities were happy to do without the new doctrines from England and Holland, and viewed with suspicion the instrument of their dissemination, the tertulia, which were private associations. In 1700 the rector of the University of Seville wrote to his counterpart in Osuna urging the destruction of a tertulia.These organisations co-operated, he said, with the object of destroying the Aristotelianism and Galenism of the schools. There were also political and economic circumstances that seem to bear on the matter. The economic centre of gravity of Europe was moving north.