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7 - Not Quacks but Close : Reappraising the Role of Physicians on the Eighteenth-Century Medical Market
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- By Hjalmar Fors
- Edited by Mari Eyice, Stockholms Universitet, Charlotta Forss, Stockholms Universitet
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- Book:
- Health and Society in Early Modern Sweden
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 16 April 2024
- Print publication:
- 01 March 2024, pp 151-174
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- Chapter
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Summary
Abstract
This chapter reassesses the relationship between physicians and the eighteenth-century Swedish state. It argues that physicians’ connection to the state was rather tenuous throughout the period, and that they were neither considered nor treated as an important part of the cameralist machine of governance. This is a position which runs contrary to earlier historiography, which has tended to portray eighteenth-century physicians as forerunners to nineteenth- and twentieth-century branches of the state that are concerned with social medicine, hygiene, and general improvement of the health of the population. By giving examples of how physicians operated in different roles on the Swedish medical market and in relation to the state, the chapter points to the sprawling complexity of early modern health practices.
Keywords: eighteenth-century medicine, Enlightenment, medical market, social medicine
Introduction
Physicians often tend to be seen as holding the top position in the hierarchy of health practitioners. In prior research, they often come across as aloof, high-status figures, who in the eighteenth-century paired up with the state to regulate, oversee, and improve the activities of all other health practitioners. This chapter argues that Swedish physicians’ connection to the state remained tenuous throughout the eighteenth century. I contend that physicians were not particularly important to the state, except as one of many groups of actors on a medical market. They were, to put it bluntly, neither considered nor treated as an important part of the machine of governance. That is not to say that they were completely unimportant, but neither were hatters, cobblers, or indeed barber-surgeons or midwives inconsequential. This, of course, is a position that runs contrary to earlier historiography, which has tended to portray eighteenth-century physicians, and in particular their main organisation the Collegium Medicum, as forerunners to nineteenth- and twentieth-century branches of the state that are concerned with social medicine, hygiene, and general improvement of the health of the population. By giving examples of how physicians negotiated with other groups and operated in different roles on the Swedish medical market and in relation to the state, this chapter instead points to the sprawling complexity and open-ended nature of early modern health practices. To create a more complex, and hopefully also more truthful, description of the role of physicians in eighteenth-century Swedish society, I take as my point of departure two propositions, which underlie the argument of the present chapter.
Making and taking theriac: an experimental and sensory approach to the history of medicine
- Nils-Otto Ahnfelt, Hjalmar Fors, Karin Wendin
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- Journal:
- BJHS Themes / Volume 7 / 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 21 October 2022, pp. 39-62
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- Article
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- You have access Access
- Open access
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This paper explores historically used medicaments by making them, or rather reworking them, in a modern laboratory and assessing them for taste, flavour and odour using sensory analysis and a trained panel of sensory assessors. Our test subject is the famous panacea theriac andromachalis, which is subjected to the methods of experimental history of science to create experimental data. We emphasize the importance of the sensory experience, in both the making and the taking of theriac. From antiquity and well into the nineteenth century, medical practitioners and patients held that the sensory qualities of medicaments were of significance. But sensory information is notoriously difficult to transmit textually, and today we know very little about the sensory characteristics of theriac, and other medicines of the past. This is a problematic lacuna in our knowledge of how actors perceived and used them. By choosing the reworking and sensory framework, we can approach early modern pharmacy both as a craft and as a creative process. Thus our study emphasizes the artisanal, or craft, aspect of medicine making. It indicates how the art of medicine making was integrated with and connected to a medical practice which relied heavily on direct sensory assessments of medicaments, disease and patients. Our purpose is, however, not to try to find out how historical medicine makers and patients ‘really felt’ when they experienced the act of smelling and tasting medicines. Our aim is rather to discuss what the sensory experience of making and tasting adds to the investigation of textual sources. Thus, by attempting to access information about the experience of medicine through experimental means, we aim to enrich and complement historical understanding of the medicines and medical theories of the past.