THE DISSENTING TRADITION IN ENGLISH MEDICINE OF THE 17TH-CENTURY AND 18TH-CENTURY

In England, medicine has always been something of a refuge for individuals whose lives have been dislocated by religious and political strife. This was particularly true in the seventeenth century when changes in Church and State were occurring at a blinding speed. In his book The experience of defeat, Christopher Hill has described the erratic careers of a number of radical clergy and intellectuals who studied and practised medicine in times of dislocation. A list pulled together from Hill's book would include: John Pordage, Samuel Pordage, Henry Stubbe, John Webster, John Rogers, Abiezer Coppe, William Walwyn and Marchamont Nedham.1 Medicine as a practical option for a lost career, or to supplement and subsidize uncertain careers, can also be found among Royalists and Anglicans when their lives were similarly disrupted during the Interregnum. Among these were the brilliant Vaughan twins, Thomas, the Hermetic philosopher, and Henry, the metaphysical poet and clergyman; the poet, Abraham Cowley; and the mercurial Nedham, who was dislocated both as a republican and as a royalist. The Anglicans Ralph Bathurst and Mathew Robinson were forced to abandon temporarily their clerical careers for medicine, only to return to the Church when times were more propitious. In the middle of the eighteenth century the political and religious disabilities of non-juring Anglicanism were still potent enough to impel Sir Richard Jebb to a successful medical career. But by and large the greatest impact on medicine came from the much larger group of the displaced, the English Dissenters, whose combination of religion and medicine were nothing short of remarkable. © 1995, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.