With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern EnglandRoutledge, 2016 M02 11 - 194 pages The practice of medicine in the days before the development of anaesthetics could often be a brutal and painful experience. Many procedures, especially those involving surgery, must have proved almost as distressing to the doctor as to the patient. Yet in order to cure, the medical practitioner was often required to inflict pain and the patient to endure it. Some level of detachment has always been required of the doctor and especially, of the surgeon. It is the construction of this detachment, or dispassion, in early modern England, with which this work is concerned. The book explores the idea of medical dispassion and shows how practitioners developed the intellectual, verbal and manual skill of being able to replace passion with equanimity and distance. As the skill of 'dispassion' became more widespread it was both enthusiastically promoted and vehemently attacked by scientific and literary writers throughout the early modern period. To explain why the practice was so controversial and aroused such furor, this study takes into account not only patterns of medical education and clinical practice but wider debates concerning social, philosophical and religious ideas. |
Contents
1 | |
1 Faithful Eyes | 9 |
2 Rational Minds | 35 |
3 Godly Hearts | 59 |
4 Disciplined Hands | 79 |
5 Necessary Inhumanity | 103 |
Other editions - View all
With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England Ms Lynda Payne Limited preview - 2013 |
With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England Lynda Payne Limited preview - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
Anatomical Lectures anatomist anatomy anatomy school anatomy theatre Anonymous Anthony à Wood Art of Surgery atheism autopsy blood bodysnatching breast cadavers Cambridge University Press Celsus Charles Cheselden College of Physicians College of Surgeons corpse Cruikshank cure Daniel Turner dead body death Descartes Diary dispassion dissecting dissecting room Doctor Duverney early modern Eighteenth Century emotional community England Ephesian Matron Epicurus friends George’s Hospital hand Harvey’s heart History of Medicine human body Hunter’s lectures Ibid Idem James John Evelyn John Hunter John Ward knowledge learned letter London mechanical philosophy medical student Molinetti nature necessary inhumanity NeoStoicism operations Oxford Padua pain Paris passions patients Pepys philosophy Physicians Physick Porter practice practitioners published pupil resurrectionists Robert Royal College Royal Society Science Seventeenth Century Simmons skin St Thomas Stoic Stoicism surgical Treatise Venereal Disease Walter Charleton Ward’s Wellcome Library William Harvey William Hunter Wilson woman wrote York