The popularization of medicine, 1650–1850

The translation of professional medical knowledge into language the public can comprehend and employ for home treatment and health maintenance has long been an important activity in Western medical culture. Since the Enlightenment particularly, instruction in matters medical has seemed a crucial element in equipping men and women to control their destiny. Historical examination of the process of medical popularization has nevertheless been occasional and incomplete. This volume, a collection of papers presented at a 1991 conference at the Wellcome Institute, stimulates a more serious appreciation of the significance and complexity of lay medical literature. The reader should be forewarned that the book can give a misleading first impression. The table of contents, after all, intersperses titles that specify quite distinct aspects of the popularization process in England among others that indicate general surveys of popularization in three Continental countries, as well as America. The suspicion that this is but another addition to that tried and tired genre of the medical historical miscellany proves unfounded, though, for while individual essayists do concentrate on specific locales, eras, and themes, their examination of the elephant is carried out from so many sides that a complete outline of the creature emerges in the end. The chapter dealing with the American experience provides the most thorough treatment of the content and context of popular medical guidance. Norman Gevitz cogently analyses the growth of domestic medicine manuals, from the colonial period to the mid-nineteenth century, as an expression of nationalism and national character. Yet as independent as New World authors professed to be, they still often only "Americanized Buchan", the Scottish popularizer par excellence. In other settings, William Buchan and his Swiss counterpart S.-A. Tissot were Gallicized or Hispanicized, those two authors clearly dominating the field of popular medical education throughout Europe well into the 1800s. Enrique Perdiguero, for example, demonstrates in considerable detail that the work of informing the public during the Spanish Enlightenment was accomplished primarily through repeated translations of their works. Maria Szlatky shows that the medical Enlightenment in Hungary relied overwhelmingly on translations and imitations of Tissot. In France, Matthew Ramsey reports, there was in fact a volume titled The French Buchan. Even the doctrine of the non-naturals, the traditional philosophy of hygiene, was made most accessible, as Antoinette Emch-Deriaz explains, by Tissot. Ramsey's contribution, like Gevitz's, strikes an even balance between the factual and the analytical. Concentrating on medicine in …