Medicine in Seventeenth Century England

Abstract

Charles D. O'Malley has had the melancholic fate to create a symposium that has become his memorial. An eminent historian of Renaissance medicine, O'Malley planned the symposium whose proceedings constitute the volume under review. On hissudden death his friends, fortunately, conducted the awaited conference. They thereby give us not only a valuable comprehensive assessment of late Renaissance English medicine but fittingly recall the great achievement and stimulus that marked O'Malley's scholarly career. Following a moving and highly personal prefatory appraisal, a model of its kind, of O'Malley as historian, the volume opens appropriately with a detailed statement of major tenets of 17th-century medical doctrine: that expressed in the Galenic system. The iatrochemism of the Paracelsians, a major challenge to Galenic orthodoxy, is then portrayed. This interplay of themes rightly instructs the reader that an understanding of the place of medicine in the scientific revolution, as is true of any innovation