The medical revolution of the seventeenth century

Taking the other tack, Richard Palmer explores the story of the papal physicians, a subject "killed ... stone dead" by the erudition of Prospero Mandosio (1696) until resurrected by Palmer with his witty and pithy observations. The turn-of-the-seventeenth-century German Prince, Maurice of Hesse-Kassel, took a direct interest in the medical details of his court and country, which Bruce Moran explores thoroughly. Moran's general remarks on why princes who identified with divine-right ideas also took such an interest in the new learning are especially important. Lawrence Brockliss explores the literary image of the French royal physicians, with surprising and illuminating results. The other essay on the French royal physicians, by Colin Jones, is a tour de force, rich in detail and clear about the Janus-faced enterprise and patronage of the court physician within the complex system of ancien regime offices and corporations. Johanna Geyer-Kordesch looks into the Prussian court and its medical patronage. In the latter half of her rather dense essay she takes up her favourite subject, Georg Ernst Stahl, as a way of exploring the dialectical tensions between a materializing view of the body that went hand-in-hand with the growing bureaucratic power of the centralized state, and what she identifies as the more holistic and integrated view of the Pietist dissenters and other drop-outs from the systematizing government. The medicine of Catherine the Great's court is explored by J. T. Alexander, who finds the concerns about epidemic disease greatly influencing decisions about medicine taken at court. The final essay by William Bynum, on the English court doctors from 1688 to 1837, is the only one with a non-Continental focus, giving a refreshing reversal of the usual geographical orientation of English-language collections. Bynum's essay covers a lot of chronological ground, but (as he himself states) remains something of a work-in-progress, being only allusive about an analysis of the physicians and their medical roles at court. The almost uniformly high standard of the analyses and research in these essays may not be enough to convince all that court medicine was an important cause of change. Perhaps too, the impression is left of almost all court medicine being the province of the prince and his or her physicians alone. But many of the essays here introduce themes and approaches that will undoubtedly be followed by future investigators. And the volume as a whole convinces that either as a reflection of change or as a cause of it, further studies of court medicine of this quality will be illuminating indeed.