This study has sought to chart the changing relationships between the seriously ill and dying and their medical practitioners and nurses between 1570 and 1720. A summary of the major findings has to begin with the principal trend noted in the first two chapters: there was a dramatic and widespread increase in the proportion of dying people receiving medical help or purchasing physic in the last days and weeks of their lives in the seventeenth century. The increase in East Kent may be measured as varying from a minimum of +360 per cent for urban higher status groups (+550 per cent for their rural counterparts) to +1,130 per cent for rural lower status groups (+600 per cent for their urban counterparts), measured across thirty-year periods centred on c. 1585 and c. 1705 (see appendix). Similar increases in medicalisation, varying according to social status and geographic location, seem to have been experienced across all the four counties included in this study, excluding only lower-status patients in rural parts of Wiltshire. given the probable under-recording of medical strategies in the accounts, there is little doubt that the majority of dying people (possibly excluding the destitute and very poor) in the last decades of the seventeenth century and the first two decades of the eighteenth obtained some form of occupationally defined medical treatment or advice. This is in distinct contrast with the situation a century earlier, at which time most paid interventions were exclusively those of an attendance or palliative nature.