The interpretation of eighteenth-century medicine has been much contested. Some have view it as a wilderness of rationalism and arid theories between the Scient

An introductory history of university-trained physicians from the middle ages to the eighteenth century.

A series of essays on the development of medicine in the century of the Enlightenment, illustrating the decline in the role of religion in medical thinking, and

Smallpox, measles, and typhus. The scourges of lethal disease—as threatening in colonial Mesoamerica as in other parts of the world—called for widespread ef

Julien Offray de la Mettrie, best known as the author of L'Homme machine, appears as a minor character in most accounts of the Enlightenment. But in this intell