Medicine in the Market Economy of the Georgian Age

Abstract

THIS survey has been arguing that medicine led a chequered existence in the ‘world we have lost’. Although the nation boasted a few great medical scientists — of whom William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood, and the astute clinician, Thomas Sydenham, are amongst the most eminent — the professional elite had more enemies than friends, and was accused of being monopolistic and self-serving without being able to offer correspondingly successful medical care. Neither the College of Physicians nor the Company of Surgeons did much for medical education or research (the Royal Society, chartered in 1662, was initially somewhat more energetic, staging the first experimental blood transfusions). Attempts by seventeenth-century Puritan reformers and by advocates of the new chemically-based drugs to change the structure of organised medical practice or to establish new theories and therapies met with resistance.