Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In the realms of medicine and public health, the eighteenth century often seems uncomfortably perched between the modern and the premodern worlds. During the eighteenth century older traditions (such as Galenism) and older realities (such as the omnipresent threat of plague) ended, and new developments (such as demographic analysis and clinical teaching) took hold. Moreover, while it would be wrong to reduce medicine or public health to epiphenomena of broader historical forces, still such forces strongly influenced the course that medicine, medical practices, and public health took in the eighteenth century and any survey must take these into account. Conversely, medicine and health became ways in which other social, political, and cultural institutions came to be understood and their purposes expressed, as in the phrase a “healthy economy” or a “diseased society.”Eighteenth-century Europe has often been portrayed as a fearfully dangerous place. Life expectancies were low, infant mortality enormous, disease rampant, cures uncertain, and surgery frightful. While obvious truth adheres to all these perceptions, each requires considerable modification in order to comprehend more perfectly the constraints and the possibilities of the world which eighteenth-century Europeans inhabited. Perhaps far more than in any previous century, the eighteenth century was an age of optimism that combined ... log in or subscribe to read full text