INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY

At the close of the seventeenth century much of practical medicine remained unchanged. Disease as putrefaction was still being evacuated from the body, stories of how illness developed in the body were still being narrated, and anatomy still provided the signposting. It appears as if the Helmontian alternative had disappeared without trace. However, this was not altogether the case. Parts of the Helmontian message about disease and its treatment were still in evidence, although one has to be careful about the question of influence: some developments were common both to Helmontian medicine and to other parts of medicine. But, certainly, the Helmontians' view that disease was a ‘thing’, and their belief that it was medicines above all else that were crucial for medicine, remained very much live issues amongst physicians, empirics and quacks. Other individuals and groups were exerting powerful influences upon the future direction that medicine was to take. Empirics, by their mere presence, which threatened to flood the medical market, gave added importance to medicines and acted as a brake against there being any one dominant theory.

Anatomy, a crucial element in the construction of disease narratives and the progressive ornament of learned medicine, was viewed with increasing scepticism as a factor in the improvement of therapeutics. Helmontians and Thomas Sydenham, probably the most influential seventeenth-century medical writer in the eighteenth century, wanted to have nothing to do with anatomy, but ‘modern’ learned physicians believed it had the potential to contribute to future developments in therapeutics.