Before Enlightenment

Download or read book Medicine Before Science written by Roger Kenneth French and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-20 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an introduction to the history of university-trained physicians from the middle ages to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. These were the elite, in reputation and rewards, and they were successful. Yet we can form little idea of their clinical effectiveness, and to modern eyes their theory and practice often seems bizarre. But the historical evidence is that they were judged on other criteria, and the argument of this book is that these physicians helped to construct the expectations of society--and met them accordingly.