Physicians
Edward Worth (1676–1733), studied for his MD at the University of Leiden, graduating from the University of Utrecht in 1701. As a university-trained physician he naturally gravitated to the works of other learned physicians and, as a result, the wide-ranging medical collection he bequeathed to Dr Steevens’ Hospital, Dublin, offers its readers a wonderful cornucopia of works on the theory and practice of early modern medicine in Europe. Here are just some examples from Worth’s substantial collection of textbooks on the practice of medicine.
Bernard de Gordon, Practica dicta lilium medicinae (Ferrara, 1486), Sig. a2r.
Worth’s medical collection is very eclectic, encompassing all the major philosophies of medicine of his time – a huge subject which will be explored in a future exhibition. In this exhibition our focus is on his extensive collection of texts devoted to the practice of medicine.[1] Practical medicine, as a genre, may, as Coste argues, be divided into a number of sub-genres: practicae, concilia, regimina and pharmacopoeias. These genres dated back at least to the fourteenth century and Worth owned an example of one of the most famous early printed texts on practical medicine: Bernard de Gordon’s Practica dicta lilium medicinae (Ferrara, 1486). This book, written by De Gordon (c. 1260–c. 1318), a French physician at the prestigious University of Montpellier, had been composed as early as 1305, and was to prove influential throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: there were no less than eight editions between the first edition of 1480 and 1574. Its structure of moving from head to foot would later be followed in other texts on practical medicine which Worth bought: by Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), and Lazare Rivière (1589–1655).
Jean Fernel, Universa medicina, ab ipso quidem authore ante obitum diligenter recognita, & quatuor libris nunquam antè editis, ad praxim tamen perquam necessariis aucta. Nunc autem studio & diligentia Guil. Plantii … postremùm elimata, & in librum Therapeutices septimum doctissimis scholiis illustrata. Accessit recens, Methodus generalis curandarum febrium, nunquam antehac edita (Frankfurt, 1592), portrait of Fernel on verso of title page.
De Gordon’s text offered one model for early modern authors of practicas but an even more influential model was offered by another French physician, Jean Fernel (1497–1558). The third book of Fernel’s compilatory magnum opus, his Universa Medicina, had been entitled Thérapeutique, and it put diseases and treatments centre stage in practical manuals. Fernel also provided his readers with case studies (concilia), and these proved to be immensely popular. Worth was clearly interested in this type of practical manual (especially the related observationes), for he owned a host of the latter – an important example being his copy of Pieter van Foreest’s Observationum et curationum medicinalium et chirurgicarum, opera omnia (Frankfurt, 1623), a text which had first appeared in 1587.
Fernel had a large medical practice, one which included Henri II (1519–59), King of France, who greatly prized his advice after Fernel managed to save the life of the king’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers (1499–66), in 1543.[2] In his dedication of the 1554 edition of his Medicina to Henri II, Fernel emphasised that the basis of his approach was to match learned theory and the lessons he had learned in his own extensive practice:
‘If I have not succeeded to the extent of my desire, I yet feel I have made some approach. From the approved opinion of antiquity, and after digesting all that has been written contributing anything lasting in philosophy and medicine, I have gathered together, not merely the suppositious and the ingenious, but what is true, solid, and established by good evidence, whether Greek, Latin, or Arab, and added to it further what my own observation has noted to be helpful to the art of healing’.[3]
Fernel’s biographer, Guillaume Plancy (1514–c. 1568), who edited Worth’s edition of Fernel’s magnum opus, provides us with important information about how Fernel, in whose house he lived for ten years, actually practised his medicine.[4] Plancy points to the still dominant role of uroscopy in diagnosis and relates that this was very much a feature of Fernel’s daily practice:
‘In France the old-established custom was for people of the commoner sort, when they fell ill, to send the urine forthwith to a physician. He would discover from it not only how long the patient had been ill, and of what kind the illness was, and what part was particularly affected, and what the especially troublesome symptoms were, but also the patient’s sex and age’.[5]
Plancy had doubts about the wisdom of this approach, pointing to the possibilities of abuse, but it is clear that Fernel continued to pursue it:
‘So indeed it came about that Fernel, following custom, accepted this common practice of physicians, wrong and debased though we must admit it was. At the outset of his practice he made inspection of urines. Rising at about 4 o’clock every morning he went from his bedroom down to his library. There he looked over some pages of text of the ancient masters, either because he did not feel satisfied about it, or that he did not sufficiently remember it, or in order to add to it something by way of commentary. After that, with the coming of daylight, he went out to his public lectures, or to visit his patients. Then it was that urines were brought to him and he would inspect them. What he opined about them he made known, and ordered treatments according to the cause of the disease, and the constitutions of the patient, as far as he could gather those by conjecture’.[6]
Fernel would then do follow up visits with his patients to ensure that the medicine he prescribed was working. Plancy notes the many conversations Fernel had with his patients, on a whole range of subjects – subtle ways by which Fernel might learn more about his patient’s normal constitution, a keen factor in any Galenic medicine.
Fernel was possibly the most influential Renaissance Galenist, a teacher who, in the words of Brockliss and Jones, sought to mould ‘the recently restored classical medical inheritance into a workable synthesis’.[7] His influence spread far beyond France, and his works, especially his ground-breaking Physiologia, were reprinted many times. As Brockliss and Jones note, though not every French Galenist agreed with some of his views on occult medicine (or his openness to new data), his emphasis on the importance of experience was taken on board by the medical faculty at Paris, and embraced with rather more enthusiasm by their counterparts at the University of Montpellier.[8] For Fernel did not view Galenism as a monolith that could not be questioned: he was eager in his own medical practice to test what worked and what did not.
This pragmatism was reflected in the advice he gave to young students, when he suggested that they find a well-written precis of medicine, and read it well; then acquaint themselves with the various medicines, both simple and compound; learn diagnostic signs; and, finally, to in effect apprentice themselves to an older practitioner:
‘Finally, to follow, long and attentively, the art of practice of some elderly practitioner, capable and experienced in treatment, and to observe in the sick patients themselves what you have read in the books and heard in the lecture-room. He held that there was much in the theoretical part of medicine which could not be explained truly, nor understood, except by way of long practice and experience. He judged that no one can get through on books alone, numerous although books are. The best instructors in medicine were in his view practice and experience’.[9]
Felix Platter, Praxeos medicae opus, quinque libris adornatum & in tres tomos distinctum … (Basel, 1656), engraved title page.
The Swiss physician Felix Platter’s Praxeos medicae moved away from a presentation of diseases from head to foot and instead, as Coste notes, offered his readers a different categorization of disease.[10] As the ornate frame on the title page of Worth’s 1656 edition makes clear, Platter (1536–1614), was very much in the Galenic mode – the twin pillars of both his title page and his medical practice being Hippocrates and Galen. In the banner at the top of the page we see Platter and two colleagues, not eating their evening meal, but anatomizing at a table while Platter writes up their findings – a reminder that physicians often worked together on anatomical experiments but also, perhaps, an allusion to Platter’s propensity for journaling. Usually locating information about the daily practice of physicians presents challenges but Platter helpfully wrote a journal of his travels from his native Basel to the University of Montpellier and about his sojourn there. It is clear that it was a family tradition for his father, Thomas Platter (1499–1582), and his half-brother (also named Thomas), also wrote journals of their experiences.[11]
Felix Platter’s journal not only offers us an insight into student life at the medical faculty of the University of Montpellier – it also shows us that the practice of medicine was not only a vocation in itself but also represented upward social mobility. Felix began his journal with the following revealing passage:
‘From my childhood I had always dreamed of studying medicine and of becoming a doctor. My father desired it as much as I did, for he had himself once approached the same study. He often spoke to me of the esteem that doctors enjoy, and when I was still a child he made me admire them as they passed on horseback in the street. Considering, then, that I had arrived at the age of fifteen, and that I was an only son, he resolved, that I might the sooner become a doctor, and in good time be a support for the family, to send me to Montpellier, where in those days the study of medicine flourished’.[12]
It proved to be a very good investment, for Felix Platter blossomed at Montpellier, and, a few years after his return to Basel, was appointed as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Basel (1562). He subsequently became Rector (1570), and, in the following year, he was appointed both municipal physician and Professor of Practical Medicine there.[13] In a document outlining his accounts from 1558 to 1612, it is clear that, while the sources of income from his academic career and his country estate were important, most of his substantial income came from his medical practice which encompassed both the citizens of Basel and its hinterland. In fact, the bulk of his income came not from treating his fellow citizens, but from his ‘practice among foreigners’.[14] Not all of these foreigners were in Basel, for Platter, like many other noted physicians of the early modern period, also practised medicine at a distance, by entering into epistolary exchanges (usually with wealthy patients).[15]
Lazare Rivière, Praxis medica. Editio octava. Integra morborum theoria, & quamplurimis remediis selectissimis locupletata (Lyon, 1653), frontispiece portrait and title page.
The title of Worth’s edition of Praxis medica of Lazare Rivière (1589–1655), gives some indication of the importance of the work for the copy he inherited from his father, John Worth (1648–88), Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, was the eighth edition of this text, the first instalment of which had appeared in 1640. Rivière was, like his medieval predecessor De Gordon, a professor of medicine at Montpellier, in his case concentrating on pharmacology and surgery. His Praxis medica became immensely popular and, with its translation into several languages, widely available. In England it (along with Sennert’s Practicae medicinae), received the attention of Nicholas Culpeper (1616–54), and a 1655 English translation by Culpeper ‘Physitian and Astrologer’, Abdiah Cole ‘Doctor of Physick’ and William Rowland ‘Physitian’ was printed by the enterprising printer Peter Cole (d. 1665), under the title The Practice of Physick in Seventeen several Books (London, 1655).[16] Cole emphasised on the title page of this translation that:
‘Above fifteen thousand of the said Books in Latin have been Sold in a very few Yeers, having been eight times printed, through all the former Impressions wanted the Nature, Causes, Signs and Differences of the Diseases, and had only the Medicines for the Cure of them’.[17]
It was natural for Cole to hype up his edition but it is clear that Rivière’s book on medical practice was a best-seller. Rivière, in his letter to the reader, presented it as a reluctant one: he recorded its genesis as follows – an insight which points to the sheer popularity of this genre of text:
‘Fifteen Yeers ago (Friendly Reader) to Satisfie the Desires of my Auditors, I undertook to explain unto them the Methodicall Cure of all inward Diseases of the Body; which that I might accomplish the sooner, I medled not at all in a manner with the Theory, knowing full well that any Student might with ease enough fetch the same from divers Authors: which notwithstanding they could not so easily do in point of Practice, because of the almost infinite Company & variety of Medicaments, wherewith the Books of those that have delivered the Practical part of Physick do swarm; with which Young Beginners are so confounded, that they remain amazed, not knowing which to choose’.[18]
The book therefore originated as lecture notes – notes which Rivière implies he had no intention of publishing, despite the entreaties of his students, until one of them took the matter into his own hands, and published an unauthorised edition – which proved to be a publishing success – Rivière tells us that ‘all the Books of this first Edition, were suddainly sold off’.[19] He was clearly chuffed with his success for he went on to inform his reader that:
‘A second Edition, and a little after that a third was procured by the same Printer, by which all of Europe was filled with Copies. Nevertheless, some yeers after, there came out three other Editions within two yeers time, one at Lions, and two other in Holland viz at Tergow and the Hague’.[20]
The author noted that he had decided to append a section on theory to his practical work in response to the feedback he had received from ‘Doctors of Physick’ in the ‘Chief Cities of France, Germany, Holland and Italy’, and therefore this new edition was, naturally, the best yet!
Rivière was perhaps slightly exaggerating, and as the inscription under his portrait in the above image indicates, he did not suffer from false modesty – he equates himself with Hippocrates! It is, however, clear that his textbook on the practice of medicine really was a European-wide best-seller and it introduced concepts he had been teaching his students at Montpellier to a much wider readership. In England alone, a new English translation called The Universal Body of Physick, in five Books was circulating within two years of Culpeper’s. One of the reasons why the text and its translation were so popular was due to the clarity of his exposition.[21] It offers the reader not only the benefit of Rivière’s long experience but also (due to his many contacts with physicians in local towns and villages), allows us to see how practice on the ground differed from that in the medical faculty of Montpellier.[22] As Brockliss and Jones note, Rivière’s lecture course at Montpellier on medical practice reflects a trend in seventeenth-century medical faculties – one which was initiated by students eager to learn more about medical practice as part of their studies.[23] The publication of Rivière’s course, and the many printed translations of it, coupled with the clarity and organization of his content, ensured that Rivière’s course became the most celebrated throughout Europe.[24] Despite being written by a ‘committed Galenist’, it continued to be used as a guide to medical practice into the eighteenth century, indicating (as Brockliss and Jones note), that medical philosophies might wax from a Galenic to an iatromechanical medical philosophy without necessarily impacting medical practice![25]
Daniel Sennert, Practicae medicinae … autore Daniele Sennerto (Wittenberg and Frankfurt, 1654), i, engraved title page.
The title page of Daniel Sennert’s Practicae medicinae reflects yet another approach, emphasising both the importance of chymical cures and Sennert’s interest in the occult. In this image we see ‘Reason’ and ‘Experience’ now playing centre stage and Hippocrates is no longer accompanied by Galen, but instead is literally shaking hands with the legendary Hermes Trismegistus. Sennert played a foremost role in introducing chymistry into the medical curriculum at the University of Wittenberg. The above work was not the only publication of Sennert’s which Worth collected – he also owned a copy of Sennert’s important chymical text: De chymicorum cum Aristotelicis et Galenicis consensu ac dissensu liber: cui accessit appendix de constitutione chymiae … (Wittenberg, 1629); his Institutionum medicinae libri V … (Wittenberg, 1644), and his treatise on scurvy: De scorbuto tractatus … (Wittenberg and Frankfurt, 1654).
Sennert was, as Henry Care (1646/7–88), noted in his English translation of 1676, ‘late publick Professor of Physick in the University of Wittenburgh’.[26] Judging by Care’s preface, Sennert’s reputation was still stellar in the later seventeenth century:
‘These latter Ages have much refin’d and improv’d the same, both in the Theory and Practice: Yet for great industry and solid judgment in scanning the opinions, and errors of former Authors, clear method, and accurate discoveries in the Therapeutical part, there is scarce any that has more obliged the world, or dived deeper into the profoundest Esculapium Mysteries, than the Famous Sennertus, in his laborious Works, for the benefit of our Country men, are rendred in to English’.[27]
Care highlighted that the work was the result of Sennert’s long practice, and the emphasis was on safety rather than experiment:
‘The Receipts and medicines being generally found by long experience, to be no less effectual than safe; So that any may freely venture on them, as being built on reason, and having the successful practice of several Ages to vouch for them’.[28]
In reality Care’s translation was a practical snapshot of Sennert’s magnum opus, which was a much longer work, wherein, as Care noted, Sennert had been keen to demonstrate its scholarly nature by ‘confuting the opinions of others’ in ‘Voluminous Discourses’.[29] For translations such as Care’s, the aim was to sell as many copies as possible and one way of doing that was to produce abridged versions such as this in order to provide a short, cheap, introduction, which would introduce a general reader to ‘the substance as to Practice’, and that in a form that would fit in their pocket![30] By translating learned texts on practical medicine translators ensured that they reached a far wider audience.
Frans de Le Boë (Sylvius), Opera Medica (Utrecht and Amsterdam, 1695), frontispiece portrait.
The above portrait of Frans de Le Boë (1614–72), perhaps one of the most famous medical professors of the University of Leiden during the second half of the seventeenth century, emphasises his role as Professor of Medical Practice. De Le Boë (more commonly known by the Latinized version of his name Franciscus Sylvius), practised chymical medicine in the mid to late seventeenth century, one which focused on the role of acids and alkali in the body. He had studied medicine at Leiden between 1633 and 1635 before travelling to Basel, where he received his MD in 1637. After a sojourn in Amsterdam where he had set up a successful medical practice, he returned to Leiden in 1658, on being offered the position of professor of medicine. There he proved to be prolific and in 1663 he produced the first book of his Praxeos medicae idea nova (New idea of medical practice).
In his preface to the reader, attached to a 1675 English translation of the New Idea of the Practice of Physic … (London, 1675), Sylvius emphasised that the work was the result of observations he had being making for years among this patients:
‘Wherefore, that I might rightly do my Duty, I spent Days and Nights both in calling slowly back into my Memory what I had for a long time considered, and had accurately examin’d and noted, and also in conferring the past with following Experiments, daily made at my own Cost for common Good, as well in drawing thence Conclusions and most solid Determinations to cure the Sick, as in informing the studious Youth (that came hither in a great number to hear me) faithfully about those things, which I judg’d were both true and good, and also in a right forming of them, according to Art, for the Practice of Physick’.[31]
Marchamont Nedham (1620–78), in his short biography of Sylvius in the same edition states:
‘Such Doctrines as have not had their Rise from the Ancients, and the Academics, but most of them from Laboratories of his own and others, wrought out of the Fire for near forty years together, and confirmed by constant Practice among the Sick; in which Work of Curing he excelled all his Fellows, in the most difficult Cases’.[32]
As Ragland notes, while at Amsterdam Sylvius had avoided standard Galenic treatments such as bleeding and purging, instead developing an oily salt that might combat acidity.[33] As Professor of Medicine at Leiden he continued this approach and, conscious that his students would benefit from bedside clinical teaching, he re-developed the city hospital for the poor, using patients for drug trials.[34] Sylvius was committed to introducing a more practical approach into the curriculum at Leiden, one which, as Parent notes, would incorporate Vesalian anatomy and the physiology of William Harvey (1578–1657).[35] He advocated a collaborative approach, dedicated not only to introducing daily bedside teaching but also sharing the results of anatomical experiments, on both dead humans and animals.[36] His post-mortems, which took place at the Collegium Medico Practicam, which was connected to the Caecilia Hospital, Leiden’s hospital for the poor, became legendary as he taught his students not only how to undertake a post-mortem, but also the approach they should take to generate new research.[37] Under Sylvius Leiden overtook Padua as the most important centre for medical training in Europe – precisely because of Sylvius’ concentration on the practical training of his students. It was this reputation which drew Worth there in the late 1690s. Sylvius’ impact on medical research was immense and the publications of his students, authors such as Jan Swammedam (1637–80), Reinier de Graaf (1641–73), Thomas Bartholin (1616–80) and Niels Steno (1638–86), were likewise collected by Worth, and are discussed in our joint exhibition (with the Old Anatomy Museum of Trinity College Dublin), on anatomy.
Friedrich Hoffmann, Medicinae rationalis systematicae … (Halle, 1720–29), frontispiece portrait and title page.
Worth was naturally most interested in the debates about medical systems and practices in his own lifetime. As a graduate of Leiden, he followed the career of the university’s rising star, Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), closely and collected a number of his works. He was likewise interested in the works of two other great system-builders of the early eighteenth century, both based at the University of Halle: Friedrich Hoffmann (1660–1742), and his colleague (and opponent), Georg Ernst Stahl (1660–1734). The activities of both men at Halle had, as Naragon notes, transformed the University of Halle into the most important centre for medical teaching in early eighteenth-century Germany.[38] It is clear that when it came to the debate between the animist Stahl and the mechanist Hoffmann, Worth was firmly in the latter’s camp and, apart from the above text, he also acquired Hoffmann’s Observationum physico-chymicarum selectiorum libri III. in quibus multa curiosa experimenta et lectissimae virutis medicamenta exhibentur (Halle, 1722); and his Opuscula physico-medica antehac seorsim edita iam revia, aucta, emendata et delectu habito recusa (Halle, 1726).
Hoffmann was an immensely important figure in early eighteenth-century medical debate. He was known as ‘the second Hippocrates’, primarily due to the above work, his multi-volume systematic account of his iatromechanical model of medicine.[39] He was, moreover, a keen advocate of spas, a topic in which Worth had an interest, and, as a mid-eighteenth-century English commentator noted, he was responsible for ‘many useful discoveries, relative to mineral waters, which had been absolutely mistaken by all former authors; and for investigating the real virtues of many peculiar springs in Germany, which either were not taken notice of before, or not perfectly understood’.[40] His works were still being translated and abridged as late as 1783 in England primarily because, as his translators William Lewis and Andrew Duncan commented, ‘The Works of the celebrated Dr Frederick Hoffman have long been held in very high esteem by every intelligent Medical Practitioner’.[41]
The Doctor-Patient Relationship
In his autobiography, which as Schweikardt notes, was probably completed shortly before his death in 1742, Hoffmann gives us some insights into his own medical practice.[42] Konert argues that despite Hoffman’s advocacy for iatromechanism, there was little change in treatments, although Hoffmann himself opposed polypharmacy.[43] The University of Halle did, however, offer far more practical training for students in the infirmaries attached to the university and, though the aim may have been more to provide Christian charity than clinical training, the result was that students at Halle ‘obtained the knowledge and experience that, in other places, was available only to practising physicians’.[44]
Hoffmann’s advice not only included his views on treatments but also explored how to deal with difficult patients, for the doctor-patient relationship could prove tricky. In fact, many medical practical manuals throughout the early modern period not only focused on how to medically treat patients but also spent some time considering how the physician should interact with his patients. Stolberg, examining not only practical textbooks such as the texts discussed here but also practice journals and correspondence compiled by earlier, sixteenth-century German physicians, points to the delicate power balance between early modern physicians and their patients for patients were quick to try alternative medical practitioners if not happy with their initial choice.[45] The fact that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century physicians were divided amongst themselves about treatments – be they Galenic or chymical – ensured that the medical marketplace was a busy one. As Stolberg notes, there was ‘not one ‘typical’ physician-patient relationship, not one standardized way in which physicians and patients interacted, The doctor-patient relationship varied widely in its intensity and quality, depending, in particular, also on the social standing of the patient’.[46] Physicians might decry patients‘ tendency to resort to unlearned apothecaries or un-licensed empirics, but they were faced with an impossible conundrum: there were simply not enough academically-educated physicians to deal with the medical demands of the populace and, secondly, their less learned competitors were both more numerous (and therefore more available) than they were, and were also providing treatments which appealed to their patients.[47]
Building up a patient’s trust was therefore very important but this was easier in some social settings rather than in others. The stereo-typical image of the early modern physician, attending his wealthy patient in the patient’s own house, does not reflect the experience of many early modern physicians. In Germany, for example, the attendance of a physician was not limited to the court (or wealthy), but was available to townspeople (and people in the rural hinterland), who could avail of the services of academically educated physicians employed by the towns to look after their citizens. However, this had implications for the doctor-patient relationship, for, as Stolberg reports, not all patient-physician relations were equal, and poorer citizens, while more numerous, were less likely to take up as much time as richer citizens.[48] Physicians in sixteenth-century German towns therefore might have had a wide catchment area but it was an unstable one – and one which made it difficult to build up a trust relationship.
Building up (and maintaining) professional authority was a key aim for many early modern physicians. As the sixteenth-century Bohemian physician Georg Handsch (1529–78), reminded himself: ‘Do not make yourself unworthy: Retain authority’.[49] Early modern physicians regarded themselves as a professional distinct body: they were academically educated and usually were members of a licensing body such as the College of Physicians in England. One of their most important defining characteristics was the fact that they had been trained by other learned physicians in the medical faculties of universities – they saw themselves, first and foremost, as men of learning.[50] Hoffmann, finishing his autobiography in 1742, would have whole-heartedly agreed with Handsch’s instruction to ‘retain authority’: he noted in his account of his life, an account which he hoped would be a model for other medical practitioners, that he himself had never allowed his patients to determine what their treatment should be.[51] His own method included a non-negotiable examination of the patient as an aid to diagnosis – only by talking to and examining the patient could Hoffmann hope to arrive at a proper diagnosis.[52]
Joseph Du Chesne, Quercetanus redivivus, hoc est Ars medica dogmatico hermetica, ex scriptis Josephi Quercetani … tomis tribus digesta: quorum I. Ars medica mediatrix, II. Ars medica auxiliatrix, III. Ars medica practica. Operâ Joannis Schröderi (Frankfurt, 1648), engraved title page vignette.
This might sound obvious but it should be remembered that, though meetings between patients and physicians might usually take place in either the patient’s own home or in that of the physician, that was not the only way in which physicians and their patients interacted in the early modern period. Stolberg’s examination of the doctor-patient relationship in sixteenth-century Germany highlights the importance of correspondence in diagnosis and prognosis for sometimes the physician might not see the patient in person at all.[53] The Italian physician Francesco Torti (1658–1741) wrote up his case histories though his were often based on epistolary exchanges, rather than face-to-face visits. This reflected a trend in Italian medicine which spread to the rest of Europe – and certainly ‘consultation by letter’ formed a part of many élite physicians’ daily practice.[54] As we have seen, for a physician such as Felix Platter, this might prove a very lucrative income stream indeed!
Text: Dr Elizabethanne Boran, Librarian of the Edward Worth Library, Dublin.
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Schweikardt, Christoph, ‘The self-presentation of the Halle medical professor Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742) mirrored by his autobiography’, Vesalius, 8, no. 2 (2002), 36–44.
Sennert, Daniel, Practical Physick … In English, by H. Care, Student in Physick, and Astrology (London, 1676).
Sgantzos, Markos, Gregory Tsoucalas, Konstantinos Markatos, Styliani Giatsiou, and George Androutsos, ‘Lazare Rivière (1589–1655 AD), the pioneer pharmacologist, anatomist, and surgeon, who gave the first modern description of an aortic valve failure’, Surgical Innovation, 22, no. 5 (2015), 546–7.
Sherrington, Sir Charles, The Endeavour of Jean Fernel (Cambridge, 1946).
Stolberg, Michael, ‘The Decline of Uroscopy in Early Modern Learned Medicine (1500–1650)’, Early Science and Medicine, 12 (2007), 313–36.
Stolberg, Michael, ‘The Doctor-Patient Relationship in the Renaissance’, European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health, 1 (2021), 1–29.
Stolberg, Michael, Learned Physicians and Everyday Medical Practice in the Renaissance (Berlin and Boston, 2022).
Sylvius, Franciscus, New Idea of the Practice of Physic, … translated … by Richard Gower … (London, 1675).
[1] As Coste notes, the line between theory and practice was a fluid one: Coste, Joël, ‘Practical medicine and its literary genres in France in the early modern period’, 2008. On Worth as a medical collector see Boran, Elizabethanne, ‘Collecting medicine in early eighteenth-century Dublin: the library of Edward Worth’, in Cunningham, John (ed.), Early Modern Ireland and the world of medicine: Practitioners, collectors and contexts (Manchester, 2019), pp 165–87.
[2] Sherrington, Sir Charles, The Endeavour of Jean Fernel (Cambridge, 1946), p. 53.
[3] Ibid., p. 137.
[4] Ibid., p. 147.
[5] Ibid., p. 168.
[6] Ibid., p. 168.
[7] Brockliss, Laurence, and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 2004), p. 129.
[8] Ibid., p. 131.
[9] Sherrington, The Endeavour of Jean Fernel, p. 157.
[10] Coste, ‘Practical medicine and its literary genres in France in the early modern period’, 2008.
[11] On the Platters see Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago, 1997).
[12] Jennett, Seán (ed.), Beloved son Felix: the journal of Felix Platter, a medical student in Montpellier in the sixteenth century. Translated and introduced by Seán Jennett; with a foreword by Jack Lindsay (London, 1962), p. 25.
[13] Le Roy Ladurie, The Beggar and the Professor, p. 338.
[14] Cumston, Charles Greene, ‘The Finances of Felix Platter, Professor of Medicine at Bâle’, Annals of Medical History, 2, no. 3 (1919), 265.
[15] Ibid., 266.
[16] This translation is not in the Edward Worth Library.
[17] Rivière, Lazare, The Practice of Physick in Seventeen several Books (London, 1655), title page.
[18] Ibid., Sig. A3r.
[19] Ibid., Sig. A3r.
[20] Ibid., Sig. A3r–v.
[21] Dulieu, Louis, ‘Lazare Rivière’, Revue d’histoire de la pharmacie, 190 (1966), 209.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France, p. 151.
[24] Ibid., p. 151.
[25] Ibid., pp 152 and 566.
[26] Sennert, Daniel, Practical Physick … In English, by H. Care, Student in Physick, and Astrology (London, 1676), title page. This translation is not in the Edward Worth Library.
[27] Ibid., Sig. A2r–v.
[28] Ibid., Sig. A4v.
[29] Ibid., Sigs. Arv–S5r.
[30] Ibid., Sig. A5r.
[31] Sylvius, Franciscus, New Idea of the Practice of Physic, … translated … by Richard Gower … (London, 1675), Sig. A6r. This work was not collected by Worth.
[32] Ibid., Sig. b5r.
[33] Ragland, Evan, ‘Sylvius, Franciscus (François or Frans dele Boë),’ in Jalobeanu, Dana, and Charles Wolfe (eds), Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences (Springer, 2020).
[34] Ibid.
[35] Parent, André, ‘Franciscus Sylvius on Clinical Teaching, Iatrochemistry and Brain Anatomy’, Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, 43 (2016), 597.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Naragon, Steven, ‘Friedrich Hoffmann (1660–1742)’, in Kuehn, Manfred, and Heiner Klemme (eds), The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophers, 3 vols. (London and New York, 2010).
[39] Ibid.
[40] James, R., The Modern Practice of Physic; As improv’d by the Celebrated Professors, H. Boerhaave, and F. Hoffman … 2 vols (London, 1746), i, p. vii. See also Schweikardt, Christoph, ‘The self-presentation of the Halle medical professor Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742) mirrored by his autobiography’, Vesalius, 8, no. 2 (2002), 37.
[41] Lewis, William, and Duncan, Andrew (ed.), A System of the Practice of Medicine (London, 1783), p. v.
[42] Schweikardt, ‘The self-presentation of the Halle medical professor Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742) mirrored by his autobiography’, 37.
[43] Konert, Jürgen, ‘Academic and practical medicine in Halle during the time of Stahl, Hoffmann and Juncker’, Caduceus, 13 (1997), 24, 26.
[44] Ibid., 30.
[45] Stolberg, Michael, ‘The Doctor-Patient Relationship in the Renaissance’, European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health, 1 (2021), 1–29.
[46] Ibid., 5.
[47] One area of contention was uroscopy, which, as Stolberg has argued, was becoming considerably less favoured among learned medical circles but still retained its popularity among the patient public: Stolberg, Michael, ‘The Decline of Uroscopy in Early Modern Learned Medicine (1500–1650)’, Early Science and Medicine, 12 (2007), 313–36.
[48] Stolberg, ‘The Doctor-Patient Relationship in the Renaissance’, 8.
[49] Cited in ibid., 12.
[50] Cook, Harold J., ‘Good advice and little medicine: the professional authority of early modern English physicians’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), 4.
[51] Schweikardt, ‘The self-presentation of the Halle medical professor Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742) mirrored by his autobiography’, 37.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Stolberg, ‘The Doctor-Patient Relationship in the Renaissance’, 9.
[54] Gentilcore, David, ‘In praise of the ordinary: shifting knowledge and practice in the medical use of drinking water in Italy, 1550–1750’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 97, no. 4 (2023), 549. On the phenomenon in seventeenth-century Scotland see Dingwall, Helen, Physicians, Surgeons and Apothecaries: Medical Practice in Seventeenth-Century Edinburgh (East Linton, 1995), pp 164–80.