Policing the health of London: the College of Physicians and the early Stuart monarchy.

Abstract

While histories of public health sugggest that government intervention British is a product of the later nineteenth country, the work of George Rosen suggested that interventionist policies on behalf of the public good are to be associated with particular political outlooks. He pointed to the connection between ?absolutism? and medical police in Europe as the foundation for later public-health policies. with Rosen?s ideas in mind, we can see that under the early Stuarts there was indeed a growing association between government policy and medical police. While early Stuart medical police developed from ad hoc measures rather than a conscious programme, it was nevertheless premised upon principle of positive sovereignty on behalf of the public good that lay at the root of Stuary ideology. Working through the court physicians,(especially Theodore Turquet de Mayerne) and the London Copllege of Physicians, the monarchy supported or created policies to regulate medical practitioners and corporations, medicines and practices, and to help insitute plans for London to prevent or ameliorate plague eoidemics that helped stimulate plans for the New Incorporation. When opposition to monatchial polices took force in the early 1640s, measures for medical police were one of the grivances against the crown, and they were ended, not to be institured again until the nineteenth century.