Health and the People in Early Modern France and England
Dr Erica Charters, Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine
Email: erica.charters@history.ox.ac.uk
The course examines the history of public health and the nature of modern governance in England and France during the late 17th and 18th centuries. Key issues include the development of population statistics, the growth of hospitals, the role of medicine in Enlightenment thought and 18th-century reform, the shaping of cities in response to disease, and the relationship between welfare, charity and healthcare. While historians have tended to focus on the global rivalry and structural differences between these two European superpowers, this course examines cultural, political and social responses to disease and illness in order to compare and contrast and early modern state formation and probe the difference between public and private healthcare. A key component of the course will be the use of readable and entertaining primary sources.
- Political arithmetic and the early modern state
- The development of hospitals in France
- The development of hospitals in England/Britain
- Enlightenment thought and medicine
- Professional medical structures: a comparison
- The early modern medical marketplace
- The end of plague, Marseilles 1722: the role of the state and the British reaction
- Smallpox innoculation and its debates: medicine and social reform
Course objectives
The main aim of the course is to illuminate the relationship between medicine and political structures in the early modern period. This is accomplished through a comparison of health practices in Britain and France, considered two key rival - and politically contrasting - European powers. The course thereby examines the nature of medical care directed at the general population in the period prior to the Revolutionary 'birth of the clinic' (acknowledged as the foundation of modern medicine). Debates over the state's role in outbreaks of epidemic disease, preventative medicine, charitable institutions such as hospitals, and scientific professional bodies provide students with tangible examples of early modern political theory and practice. By the same token, the comparison between France and Britain demonstrates the variety of medical cultures in the early modern period, and allows students to use medical care to evaluate structural differences between early modern France and Britain. The course will enable students to engage with theory on the nature of modern medicine and the modern state (e.g. Michel Foucault), to place the history of medicine within the broader context of the formation of the early modern state, and to evaluate assumptions about British exceptionalism and commercialism, on the one hand, and French absolutism and inexorable decline, on the other.
Course requirements
There will be eight course sessions spread over Hilary and Trinity terms. Sessions will be held in the seminar room of 47 Banbury Road on Tuesday mornings from 10.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. Students will be expected to make two presentations each during the course, which will be assigned at the first session in week 1. Assessment will be either by written examination or by two 5,000-word essays.
Key texts
There is no single text that can serve as an overview of the course but the texts selected below are among the most important and have some relevance beyond a single week’s session.
•L. W. B. Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 1997).
•Thomas L. Haskins, Jean d'Alembert: Science and the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1970)
•Daniel Hickey, Local Hospitals in Ancien Regme France: Rationalization, Resistance, Renewal, 1530-1789 (London, 1997)
•Colin Jones, The Charitable Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Regime and Revolutionary France (London, 1989)
•Susan C. Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners in Eighteenth-Century London (Cambridge, 1996)
•Mary Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe (1999).
•Tim McHugh, Hospital Politics in Seventeenth-Century France: The Crown, Urban Elites and the Poor (Aldershot, 2007)
•Genevieve Miller, The Adoption of Inoculation for Smallpox in England and France (Philadelphia, 1957)
•Sean M. Quinlan, The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity, and Health Crises in Revolutionary France c. 1750-1850 (2007)
•James C. Riley, The Eighteenth-Century Campaign to Avoid Disease (1987).
•Guenter B. Risse, Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland: Care and Teaching at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (Cambridge, 1986)
•Andrea Rusnock, Vital Accounts:Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge, 2002)
•Paul Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1985)
Primary texts are widely accessible and in English translations: Daniel Defoe's writings on the 1722 Marseilles plague (including Journal of a Plague Year); 'medecine' in Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary, entries on medicine and medical care in the Encyclopedie, the Bernoulli-D'Alembert controversy regarding inoculation in L. Bradley (trans. and ed.) Smallpox Inoculation: An Eighteenth-Century Mathematical Controversy (1971).
 |
List of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology advanced papers |