Epistolary Consultations on Venereal Disease 69 Epistolary Consultations on Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century France
نویسنده
چکیده
This essay examines the way in which medical consultations by letter were employed to seek and receive advice on venereal diseases in eighteenth-century France. Epistolary consultations from across eighteenth-century Europe have been used by historians for purposes that have included examining physician/patient power relationships; as a reflection of medical practice; to analyze perceptions of the female body; and to examine the different ways patients and physicians saw illness and therapy. This essay differs from others by focusing on two diseases that were particularly socially significant, la vérole (pox) and la gonorrhée (gonorrhea). Correspondence involving patients, their local medical practitioners (médecins ordinaires) and consultant physicians and surgeons has been analyzed for evidence of differentiation between the treatments offered to, and attitudes towards, male and female patients. By the eighteenth century only the plague had been written about more as a social, medical and historical phenomenon. This level of historical attention has continued to the present day. This essay looks at the way in which patients, their local professionals and consultants corresponded with each other on this particular group of ailments. It examines how gender differences in society at large were reflected in writing about, and the practices for treating, venereal diseases. It also briefly examines the competition that physicians had to face, in what this essay argues was a particularly contested sector of the medical market. In 1692 the physician Monsieur Flamant in The Art of preserving and restoring Health described venereal diseases as “the first reward of unbridled lust.”
منابع مشابه
Joël Coste, Les Ecrits de la souffrance: la consultation médicale en France, 1550-1825 (Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2014), pp. 272, €25, paperback, ISBN: 978-2-87673-973-4.
This book by Joël Coste tries to fill a gap in the medical historiography of Early Modern France. Indeed, studies specific to medical correspondence are extremely rare; it is what makes the book all the more invaluable. A specialist of the consilia, the epistolary consultations which date from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, Professor Coste has produced a new, quality volume which wi...
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