With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern EnglandThe practice of medicine in the days before the development of anaesthetics could often be a brutal and painful experience. Many procedures, especially those involving surgery, must have proved almost as distressing to the doctor as to the patient. Yet in order to cure, the medical practitioner was often required to inflict pain and the patient to endure it. Some level of detachment has always been required of the doctor and especially, of the surgeon. It is the construction of this detachment, or dispassion, in early modern England, with which this work is concerned. The book explores the idea of medical dispassion and shows how practitioners developed the intellectual, verbal and manual skill of being able to replace passion with equanimity and distance. As the skill of 'dispassion' became more widespread it was both enthusiastically promoted and vehemently attacked by scientific and literary writers throughout the early modern period. To explain why the practice was so controversial and aroused such furor, this study takes into account not only patterns of medical education and clinical practice but wider debates concerning social, philosophical and religious ideas. |
Contents
11 | |
Rational Minds | |
Godly Hearts | |
Disciplined Hands | |
Necessary Inhumanity | |
Conversant with the Dead | |
Epilogue | |
Index | |
Other editions - View all
With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England Ms Lynda Payne Limited preview - 2013 |
With Words and Knives: Learning Medical Dispassion in Early Modern England Lynda Payne Limited preview - 2016 |
Common terms and phrases
Anatomical Lectures anatomist anatomy school anatomy theatre Andrew Anne Greene Anonymous Anthony à Wood Art of Surgery autopsy blood bodysnatching breast cadavers Cambridge University Press Celsus Charles Cheselden Chicago circulation Clarendon Press College of Physicians College of Surgeons corpse Cruikshank cure Daniel Turner dead body death Descartes Diary dispassion dissecting dissecting room Doctor Duverney early modern Edinburgh Eighteenth Century emotional community England English Ephesian Matron Epicurus friends hand Harvey's heart History of Medicine Hospital human body Ibid Idem James John Evelyn John Hunter John Ward Keynes knowledge learned letter London mechanical philosophy medical student Molinetti necessary inhumanity NeoStoicism operation Oxford Padua pain Paris passions patients Pepys philosophy Physicians Physick Porter practice practitioners published pupil resurrectionists Robert Royal College Royal Society Science Seventeenth Century Simmons skin St Thomas Stoic Stoicism surgeon surgical Treatise Venereal Disease Walter Charleton Wellcome Library William Harvey William Hunter wrote York