Anti-quack literature in early Stuart England
Abstract
During the thirty years preceding the Civil War, learned physicians such as John
Cotta, James Hart, James Primerose and Edward Poeton produced a stream of works
attacking those who practised medicine without what they regarded as the proper
training and qualifications. Recent scholarship has tended to view these as exercises in
economic protectionism within the context of the ‘medical marketplace’. However,
increasing attention has latterly been drawn to the Calvinist religious preferences of
these authors, and how these are reflected in their arguments, the suggestion being
that these can be read as oblique critiques of contemporary church reform.
My argument is that professional and religious motivations were in fact
ultimately inseparable within these works. Their authors saw order and orthodoxy in
all fields - medical, social, political and ecclesiastical - as thoroughly intertwined, and
identified all threats to these as elements within a common tide of disorder. This is
clearest in their obsession with witchcraft, that epitome of rebellion, and with priest-physicians;
practitioners who tended to combine medical heterodoxy, anti-Calvinist
sympathies and a taste for the occult, and whose practices were innately offensive to
puritan social thought while carrying heavy Catholic overtones.
These works therefore reflected an intensely conservative worldview, but my
research suggests that they should not necessarily be taken as wholly characteristic of
early Stuart puritan attitudes. All of these authors can be associated with the moderate
wing of English Calvinism, and Cotta and Hart developed their arguments within the
context of the Jacobean diocese of Peterborough, where an entrenched godly elite was
confronted by an unusually rigourous conformist church court regime. They sought to
promote a particular vision of puritan orthodoxy against conformist heterodoxy; in
light of the events of the interregnum, it seems likely that this concealed more diverse
attitudes towards medical reform amongst the godly.
Authors
Dandridge, RossCollections
- Theses [4361]