The Tudor-Stuart era of English history affords a convenient and instructive framework for examining the royal medical staff, the complex schism in the health-care profession, and the role of the sovereign in English medicine during a time of political and religious tumult. Of chief importance to our inquiry has been investigating the care that the royal doctors provided to the kings and queens of Great Britain and their families, care that affected every citizen. Reliable medical information is hard to come by in the biographies of monarchs and some of the most conscientious scholars have been forced to construct medical interpretations from questionable anecdotes. Amateur medical writing can be misleading even when based on the opinions of professionals contemporary to the patient; the king’s doctors might understandably be reticent about the illnesses and deaths of their deceased sovereign. Moreover, medical description and its precise explication become even more difficult to verify in evidence hundreds of years old. Inaccurate and cavalier usage of psychological terms by laymen spawned many biographical mistakes in twentieth-century tomes. Nonetheless, pathography, the presentation of medical facts in biography, remains valuable for the student of a monarch’s life. The best sources from which to cull this sort of information about kings and queens are the unpublished notes and the arcane, albeit occasionally printed, accounts of the royal doctors.

Additionally, the archives yield much about the individual physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries who served the Tudor-Stuart households. Yet surprisingly, given the varied activities of aulic doctors as propagandists, diplomats, and medical politicians, medicine within the patrician setting of the royal court has been largely neglected. Some of the illustrious professionals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have received academic attention, but the past prominence of the aulic medical corps has faded except in the estimate of occupational antiquarians or genealogically minded descendants of the near-great. In recent years, medical and social historians have focused on ordinary practitioners and their patients, eschewing the study of acclaimed, elite doctors for political or publishing reasons. Scholarly lack of interest coupled with partisan disdain edged the distinctive leaders of professional organizations off center-stage before their stories were written. Besides their individual import, the doctors at court are too consequential collectively and their multifaceted impact on medicine too great to be ignored.