Lorenz Heister (1683-1758) and the “Bachmann Case”: Social Setting and Medical Practice of Trepanation in Eighteenth-Century

Trepanation ◽  
2003 ◽  
pp. 285-300
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Social Setting ◽  
Lorenz Heister

La Mettrie, Julien Offroy de (1709–51)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Wellman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
French Enlightenment ◽  
The Family ◽  
Medical Career

La Mettrie is best known as the author of the eighteenth-century materialist manifesto, L’Homme machine (1747). His interest in philosophical issues grew out of his preoccupation with medicine, and he developed a tradition of medical materialism within the French Enlightenment. Born in St Malo, into the family of a prosperous textile merchant, La Mettrie pursued a medical career in Paris. He also studied for two years with the renowned Hermann Boerhaave in Leiden. After a brief period of medical practice, La Mettrie devoted his efforts to his translations and commentaries on Boerhaave’s medical works. He also began to publish the works that made him a pariah to both the Faculty of Medicine of Paris and to the orthodox – that is, his medical satires and his first work of materialist philosophy, L’Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745). Because of the outrage provoked by these works, he was exiled to Holland in 1745. But L’Homme machine, the text in which he applied his materialism thoroughly and explicitly to human beings, was too radical even for the unusually tolerant Dutch, and La Mettrie was forced to seek asylum at the court of Frederick the Great where he later died. His willingness to publish ideas his contemporaries considered too dangerous led the philosophes to repudiate him.

A Rural Revolution

2020 ◽  
pp. 30-38
Author(s):  
Gavin Weightman
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Medical Procedures

This chapter focuses on Daniel Sutton's method of 'Suttonian' inoculation against smallpox. It is not easy to appreciate now how it might be possible for a 'medical revolution' to take place when it involved absolutely no advance in the understanding of infections, nor any close studies of the effectiveness of different drugs or medical procedures. But 'Suttonian inoculation' was a genuine breakthrough, and was recognised as such at the time by most medical authorities. It evolved from a rejection of customary medical practice and a partial return to the simplicity of the Turkish method of inoculation. Lady Mary's anecdotal accounts of the work of the elderly Greek ladies were probably more influential than any theories about the nature of disease. It was a rustic kind of revolution which began in the Suffolk village of Kenton in the mid-eighteenth century.

Medical Care and Medical Education, 1750–1825

1987 ◽  
Author(s):  
William G. Rothstein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Education ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Gross Anatomy ◽  
Drug Preparation ◽  
Anatomical Structures ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth

Medical care at the end of the eighteenth century, like that in any period, was determined by the state of medical knowledge and the available types of treatment. Some useful knowledge existed, but most of medical practice was characterized by scientific ignorance and ineffective or harmful treatments based largely on tradition. The empirical nature of medical practice made apprenticeship the dominant form of medical education. Toward the end of the century medical schools were established to provide the theoretical part of the student’s education, while apprenticeship continued to provide the practical part. The scientifically valid aspects of medical science in the late eighteenth century comprised gross anatomy, physiology, pathology, and the materia medica. Gross anatomy, the study of those parts of the human organism visible to the naked eye, had benefitted from the long history of dissection to become the best developed of the medical sciences. This enabled surgeons to undertake a larger variety of operations with greater expertise. Physiology, the study of how anatomical structures function in life, had developed at a far slower pace. The greatest physiological discovery up to that time, the circulation of the blood, had been made at the beginning of the seventeenth century and was still considered novel almost two centuries later. Physiology was a popular area for theorizing, and the numerous physiologically based theories of disease were, as a physician wrote in 1836, “mere assumptions of unproved, and as time has demonstrated, unprovable facts, or downright imaginations.” Pathology at that time was concerned with pathological or morbid anatomy, the study of the changes in gross anatomical structures due to disease and their relationship to clinical symptoms. The field was in its infancy and contributed little to medicine and medical practice. Materia medica was the study of drugs and drug preparation and use. Late eighteenth century American physicians had available to them a substantial armamentarium of drugs. Estes studied the ledgers of one New Hampshire physician from 1751 to 1787 (3,701 patient visits), and another from 1785 to 1791 (1,161 patient visits), one Boston physician from 1782 to 1795 (1,454 patient visits), and another from 1784 to 1791 (779 patient visits).

scholarly journals Mineral Waters, Electricity, and Hemlock: Devising Therapeutics for Children in Eighteenth-Century Institutions

2013 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
ASHLEY MATHISEN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Practice ◽  
Mineral Waters ◽  
Special Consideration ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Children's Diseases ◽  
Child Patients ◽  
Do So

AbstractThe development of paediatric medicine as a formal field of medical specialisation is usually traced to the mid-nineteenth century at the earliest. While it is true that formal specialisation in children’s medicine was not, on the whole, typical for eighteenth-century medical practitioners, many displayed a deep and lasting interest in the diseases of children, and were consequently eager to develop therapeutic practices which could be targeted at infants and children. This led to a variety of attempts at innovation, many of which benefitted from the co-operation of, and opportunities afforded by, institutions. By examining the efforts of several medical practitioners at the London Foundling Hospital and at the Dispensary for the Infant Poor, this article explores how eighteenth-century medical practitioners used their affiliations with institutions to address the problems of devising or adapting therapeutic practices and treatments for children. In tailoring medical practice to suit children and, more specifically, in using institutions to do so, medical practitioners were demonstrating that child patients required special consideration, that children’s diseases could be managed medically and with the benefit of new approaches and methods, and that children’s health, as a whole, was the province of medical practitioners.

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