What was the English Medical Renaissance?

Hello. I'm Harold Cook.

I'm a professor of history at Brown University,

and I'm going to speak to you about the English medical renaissance.

Um, I should say that before I came to Brown,

I was at UCL in London and travelled widely.

And one of my interests is therefore to place the medical

renaissance in England in a larger European and world context.

So let's just get to start this first module,

um, and consider

the terms medicine and renaissance in England, just about England.

You know, the country. Of course,

we're talking about the period from that's

usually characterised as the tutor Stuart period.

So from the late 15th century to the early 18th century,

it's a period with massive changes in world history as you'll be well aware.

And I want to draw your attention to some of the

things under way that affected medicine and health in the period.

One of them is the global transformations in

trade and what used to be called contact.

There's tremendous chaos in the world warfare colonisation process is underway.

This also means a movement of peoples too many other places,

and along with the movement of peoples comes the movement of plants,

animals and diseases and substances, which include medical substances.

Indeed, the so called spice this is

that the Europeans were so interested in acquiring from other

places in Asia often had medical effects as well.

And in this transformation with people on the move,

there was also knowledge exchange happening.

So there were also transfers of information and how to use

things that people found in other places how to acquire information,

but also how to acquire goods

and how to live in other parts of the world.

So from the European side of things, this looks like processes of colonisation,

which they certainly were.

But some of the underlying processes are there throughout the world.

So in Afro Eurasia,

the great trade routes had been in the Indian Ocean and parts of the Mediterranean,

and the Europeans were drawing on those as they went out into the world.

The last thing to say is, we need to include the Pacific in our thinking here as well,

because people are crossing the Pacific as well, not as often as the Atlantic.

But the Manila Galleons, for instance,

are an example of an annual trip made from Manila

in the Philippines to Acapulco in Mexico and back again.

And that's where a lot of silver was going to Asia

and silks and spices and other things coming to the Americas.

In addition to these global transformations, the population is rising.

In Europe, there was a very slight

rise in population.

Um, but the rise in population numbers in cities was very dramatic.

And so you get lots of movement into the cities.

The great urban centres are in southeast England and

across the Channel and in the low countries.

That region around the English Channel in the bottom of the

North Sea was one place where there was lots of urbanisation,

very high concentration of people living in cities,

the other being in northern Italy.

And cities were developing in many other places in Europe as well,

but lots of movement into the cities.

The population explosion of the city's also meant changes in,

um, death rates in the cities.

And of course, they were places where there were high levels of, uh,

epidemic disease.

In addition, there were increased numbers of educated people.

Literacy was going up again slightly, but over time,

making a big difference with more and more

educated people and more and more small numbers,

but nevertheless more formally educated people.

Many wanted to surpass the power and glory of the Roman Empire.

This is, of course, classically,

where the word renaissance comes from the rebirth of antiquity.

We'll see by the 17th century many people also arguing that

the ancient Romans could not only be equal but surpassed.

And finally,

I want to draw your attention to one of the processes related to literacy,

which is paperwork.

Paper is coming to Europe in the late Middle Ages,

being produced by paper mills in many places by the 15th century,

and the printing revolution depends upon paper as well.

But whether it's riding on paper, drawing on paper or printing on paper,

paper meant the transformation of information much more easily widely.

And even you could keep account books

not only for businesses, but even at your home.

And so you get the beginnings of recipe books as they're called,

kept at home so people could gather information, put them in their books,

pass them down through the generations and

accumulate information even for personal use.

Finally, with that increase in population and increase in literacy.

More and more people are turning to medical practise to make their living,

Um, and also to advise governments which are growing mentioned those in a minute.

The economy is taking off, you might say,

in terms of market relations and specialisation of labour,

you can see medical advertisements using the print revolution

being widely distributed in the streets of cities,

and most of them have disappeared.

But some of that medical ephemera from the period

has been collected and is available for study.

New medicines from around the world were being

concocted locally and also imported from other places.

So this renaissance is also connected to a consumer revolution, as it was called,

Um,

and that means that the marketplace for medicines and

medical practitioners and medical advice was rising very greatly.

And finally the state had an interest in medicines.

The early modern period is one that is associated with state formation,

and monarchs,

princes and armies and navies were looking for solutions to medical problems,

either to prevent disease from coming to the court or

for getting injured or sick sailors back on their feet

so that they could do the jobs necessary aboard ships

so states are also having effect on medical demand.

Just maybe,

I can conclude with an example of one of these kind of new medical practitioners.

His name was John Colbert.

He gained prestige for his experimentalism in medicine,

his making of new medicines.

He was connected to the medical commerce and the needs of the state.

He was from Worcester. He was apprenticed as an apothecary.

He moved to London in the early 16 nineties.

He became known for his proprietary, vulnerable, airy powder.

This is a powder to stop wounds from bleeding.

He tried it on a dog's first before using it on people.

The London surgeons thought that he was a quack and that this didn't work.

They tried it out on dogs also,

but they also then tried it out on patients

in hospital and thought that it didn't work.

He then

had a patron in the Army who allowed him to go to Flanders,

where the British Army was campaigning with William, the third against France.

And he got to try out his powder on wounded soldiers. And he proclaimed

great success,

a kind of experimental test of his new remedy.

Um,

he explained its function according to its efficacy according to the

acids and alkali theory that was growing up at the time.

So he put his, um, findings in the framework of the experimental sciences,

experimental medicine and the new ideas about chemistry of the period.

He remained a very controversial figure,

but he also had patrons in many places and published on the plague when

it was feared that it would come again to England from southern France.

Uh, but he gained a knighthood from George the first in, uh,

17, 16. He ended up being able to drive around in carriages and horses.

Um And so, by his death, in 17 29 he had been quite a successful medical practitioner,

making his way up the kind of greasy pole in this

commercial new experimental culture of medicine in the late 17th,

early 18th century.

So in short, if we look at what's happening in this period,

um, there are many processes that look modern to us.

Um, why it's called the early modern period.

Uh, that includes new material interests and state interests.

Um, the beginnings of a commercial system that eventually morphs into capitalism.

Um,

many of these processes are

encouraging certain kinds of entrepreneurial activity

in medicine as well as in many other areas of life.

Uh, and both science and sale of remedies,

rather than advice is what we're going to be considering.

Why do medicines and interest in substances become so important in this period?

The final thing to say is medicine in this period is not only marking

change.

Therefore,

it is beginning to cause some of the changes

underway in the Tudor Stuart period in England.