This study of the changes wrought on medieval medicine by the “scientific revolution” is less detailed than other books on medical beliefs and practices. French claims that the book is not a history of medical ideas, but he depicts medicine as ever seeking to reconcile medical practice with a “medical theology” derived from Aristotle and Galen.
Figure 1.
Roger French
Cambridge University Press, £16.95, pp 296 ISBN 0 521 00761 5
Rating: ★★★
The entire edifice of Aristotelian notions regarding the body, the heavens, and disease had disintegrated by 1700—discredited by the onslaught of observation and experiments. Repeated invalidation of its parts soon destroyed trust in the whole, resulting in prolonged medical uncertainty.
Brilliant chapters discuss the theory of contagion after the Black Death, the impact of syphilis, and how the anatomical work of Vesalius and Harvey—together with the work of figures such as Galileo, Newton, and Descartes—forced new attitudes on the profession. However, by publicly endorsing old dogmas and distancing itself from the “new heresies” emerging from dissection and experiment, medicine plunged itself into a crisis of theory that it concealed with only limited success. Such an ambivalence probably persists in such modern controversies as complementary medicine and the BMJ's obituary of David Horrobin (BMJ 2003;326: 885).
Medieval medicine's view of each case of human suffering as the manifestation of God's will in the world prevented it from seeing contagion as an indiscriminate force. That God's will should fail to distinguish between the sickness of sinners and the good health of the pious was an unthinkable medical blasphemy. Yet the plague killed as many clerics as sinners and so changed medical theory for ever.
By ignoring countless doctors' diaries and letters and patients' records, French reframes the “success” of medieval medicine not in terms of clinical effectiveness but solely in terms of high status, scholarly endorsement, the charm and “plausible patter” of physicians, and conformity with medical theology. Because medieval medicine made sense and was lucrative, he says, it enjoyed high social standing. However, that it made sense and enjoyed high status because it cured sickness seems a more plausible interpretation. It runs counter to common sense that dying patients would not dent the good standing of medieval physicians.
Could Christian medicine really have enjoyed high social status for centuries if it rested on blatant clinical failure? And what conceptual baggage from the present, if any, can historians legitimately carry into an examination of the past? The book's factual content impresses more than its interpretations.