Medicine and Morals in the Enlightenment

Medicine and Morals in the Enlightenment PDF Author: Lisbeth Haakonssen
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042002081
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Modern medical ethics in the English-speaking world is commonly thought to derive from the medical philosophy of the Scotsman John Gregory (1725-1773) and his younger associates, the English Dissenter Thomas Percival (1740-1804) and the American Benjamin Rush (1745-1813). This book is the first extensive study of this suggestion. Dr Haakonssen shows how the three thinkers combined Francis Bacon's and the Scottish Enlightenment's ideas of the science of morals and the morals of science. She demonstrates how their medical ethics was a successful adaptation of traditional moral ideas to the dramatically changing medical world especially the voluntary hospital. In accounting for the dynamics of this process, she rejects the anachronism that modern medical ethics was a new paradigm.

Medicine and Morals in the Enlightenment

Medicine and Morals in the Enlightenment PDF Author: Lisbeth Haakonssen
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042002081
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Modern medical ethics in the English-speaking world is commonly thought to derive from the medical philosophy of the Scotsman John Gregory (1725-1773) and his younger associates, the English Dissenter Thomas Percival (1740-1804) and the American Benjamin Rush (1745-1813). This book is the first extensive study of this suggestion. Dr Haakonssen shows how the three thinkers combined Francis Bacon's and the Scottish Enlightenment's ideas of the science of morals and the morals of science. She demonstrates how their medical ethics was a successful adaptation of traditional moral ideas to the dramatically changing medical world especially the voluntary hospital. In accounting for the dynamics of this process, she rejects the anachronism that modern medical ethics was a new paradigm.

La Mettrie

La Mettrie PDF Author: Kathleen Anne Wellman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
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 intellectual biography by Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie--physician-philosophe--emerges as a central figure whose medical approach to philosophical and moral issues had a profound influence on the period and its legacy. Wellman's study presents La Mettrie as an advocate of progressive medical theory and practice who consistently applied his medical concerns to the reform of philosophy, morals, and society. By examining his training with the Dutch physician Hermann Boerhaave, his satires lampooning the ignorance and venality of the medical profession, and his medical treatises on subjects ranging from vertigo to veneral disease, Wellman illuminates the medical roots of La Mettrie's philosophy. She shows how medicine encouraged La Mettrie to undertake an impiricist critique of the philosophical tradition and provided the foundation for a medical materialism that both shaped his understanding of the possibilities of moral and social reform and led him to espouse the cause of the philosophers. Elucidating the medical view of nature, human beings, and society that the Enlightenment and La Mettrie in particular bequethed to the modern world, La Mettrie makes an important contribution to our understanding of both that period and our own.

Medicine in the Enlightenment

Medicine in the Enlightenment PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 940120019X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
The interpretation of eighteenth-century medicine has been much contested. Some have view it as a wilderness of rationalism and arid theories between the Scientific Revolution and the astonishing changes of the nineteenth-century. Other scholars have emphasized the close and fruitful links between medicine and the Enlightenment, suggesting that medical advance was the very embodiment of the philosphes’ ideal of a practical science that would improve mankind’s lot and foster human happiness. In a series of essays covering Great Britain, France, Germany and other parts of Europe, noted historians debate these issues through detailed examinations of major aspects of eighteenth-century medicine and medical controversy, including such topics as the introduction of smallpox inoculation, the transformation of medical education, and the treatment of the insane. The essays as a whole suggest a positive reading of the transformations in eighteenth-century medicine, while stressing local diversity and uneven development.

Medicine Before Science

Medicine Before Science PDF Author: Roger Kenneth French
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521007610
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
This book offers an introduction to the history of university-trained physicians from the middle ages to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. These were the elite, in reputation and rewards, and they were successful. Yet we can form little idea of their clinical effectiveness, and to modern eyes their theory and practice often seems bizarre. But the historical evidence is that they were judged on other criteria, and the argument of this book is that these physicians helped to construct the expectations of society--and met them accordingly.

For All of Humanity

For All of Humanity PDF Author: Martha Few
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816531870
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Smallpox, measles, and typhus. The scourges of lethal disease—as threatening in colonial Mesoamerica as in other parts of the world—called for widespread efforts and enlightened attitudes to battle the centuries-old killers of children and adults. Even before edicts from Spain crossed the Atlantic, colonial elites oftentimes embraced medical experimentation and reform in the name of the public good, believing it was their moral responsibility to apply medical innovations to cure and prevent disease. Their efforts included the first inoculations and vaccinations against smallpox, new strategies to protect families and communities from typhus and measles, and medical interventions into pregnancy and childbirth. For All of Humanity examines the first public health campaigns in Guatemala, southern Mexico, and Central America in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Martha Few pays close attention to Indigenous Mesoamerican medical cultures, which not only influenced the shape and scope of those regional campaigns but also affected the broader New World medical cultures. The author reconstructs a rich and complex picture of the ways colonial doctors, surgeons, Indigenous healers, midwives, priests, government officials, and ordinary people engaged in efforts to prevent and control epidemic disease. Few’s analysis weaves medical history and ethnohistory with social, cultural, and intellectual history. She uses prescriptive texts, medical correspondence, and legal documents to provide rich ethnographic descriptions of Mesoamerican medical cultures, their practitioners, and regional pharmacopeia that came into contact with colonial medicine, at times violently, during public health campaigns.

Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe

Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe PDF Author: Ole Peter Grell
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754656388
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This volume explores the relationship between medicine and religion during the Enlightenment Period, here understood as covering the years 1650 to 1789. It looks at this multi-faceted relationship with respect to among others: medical care and death in hospitals, religious vocation and nursing, chemical medicine and religion, the clergy and medicine, the continued significance of popular medicine, faith healing, dissection and religion, and religious dissent and medical innovation. Within these significant areas the volume provides a European perspective which will make it possible to draw comparisons and determine differences.

The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century

The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Andrew Cunningham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521382359
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
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 the increased use of reason.

A Short History of Medical Ethics

A Short History of Medical Ethics PDF Author: Albert R. Jonsen
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195134559
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
A physician says, "I have an ethical obligation never to cause the death of a patient," another responds, "My ethical obligation is to relieve pain even if the patient dies." The current argument over the role of physicians in assisting patients to die constantly refers to the ethical duties of the profession. References to the Hippocratic Oath are often heard. Many modern problems, from assisted suicide to accessible health care, raise questions about the traditional ethics of medicine and the medical profession. However, few know what the traditional ethics are and how they came into being. This book provides a brief tour of the complex story of medical ethics evolved over centuries in both Western and Eastern culture. It sets this story in the social and cultural contexts in which the work of healing was practiced and suggests that, behind the many different perceptions about the ethical duties of physicians, certain themes appear constantly, and may be relevant to modern debates. The book begins with the Hippocratic medicine of ancient Greece, moves through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe, and the long history of Indian 7nd Chinese medicine, ending as the problems raised modern medical science and technology challenge the settled ethics of the long tradition.

A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier

A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier PDF Author: Elizabeth Ann Williams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
This study is a cultural history of Montpellier vitalism, regarded by many historians as the leading school of medicine in the French Enlightenment. Offering a holistic understanding of physical-moral relation in place of Descartes' mind-body dualism, Montpellier vitalism supplied essential discursive foundations of the medical enlightenment.

Enlightenment and Pathology

Enlightenment and Pathology PDF Author: Anne C. Vila
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801858093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
If moods are as contagious as colds, and wickedness as debilitating as a bad diet, inquiries into assorted discourses in 18th-century France still have much to tell. Author Anne Vila shows that multiple junctures between the body and the mind promoted a steady commerce of speculation and discussion between science and the social salons of the time. 9 illustrations.