Medical Practitioners in Early Modern Europe

Medicine Through Time – The English Medical Renaissance: A Gendered Perspective

In this course, Professor Mary Fissell (Johns Hopkins University) looks at women’s role in the English Medical Renaissance, spanning from 1400-1800. In the first module, we look at who practiced medicine in early modern Europe. In the second module, we consider the impact that the invention of the printing press had on the medical marketplace in 16th-century Europe, before in the third module turning to think about the impact of the invention of medical journals on Europe’s medical marketplace.

Medical Practitioners in Early Modern Europe

In this lecture, we think about the individuals that treated those who were sick in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe, focusing in particular on: (i) physicians, such as William Harvey, and their role as university-educated medical practitioners; (ii) surgeons, such as Jacques Guillemeau, and the kinds of operations that were performed in early modern Europe; (iii) apothecaries and their role as the early-modern chemist; (iv) the significance of domestic medicine, and the large numbers of ordinary people who doctored one another at home; and (v) midwives, and the importance of gender to the medical practices surrounding childbirth.