Richard Wiseman and the Medical Practitioners of Restoration London†

Abstract

The case histories used to illustrate Richard Wiseman's Several Chirurgicall Treatises (1676) reveal not only pathological and therapeutic detail but much information about the range of occupational relationships between Wiseman and the many London physicians with whom he collaborated on cases (more than forty are identified in an appendix to this article). His interaction with the two physicians with whom he had most to do, Francis Prujean and Walter Needham, exemplifies the extremes of such relationships. With Prujean, an older man and a leading figure in the College of Physicians, a formal and hierarchical relationship was observed, in which distinct occupational lines were maintained. In the case of Needham, a younger physician whose devotion to anatomical study was shared by Wiseman, a friendship developed between the two men that carried over into practice and tended to break down occupational and intellectual distinctions, so that Needham sometimes involved himself in Wiseman's surgical practice, and Wiseman initiated medical research later reported by Needham to the Royal Society.