The Rural Medical Marketplace in Southern England c. 1570–1720

Abstract

Most recent work on the relationship between medicine and the market in early modern England has focused on patients and practitioners in towns and cities, particularly London. Indeed, the idea of a ‘medical marketplace’ was developed for London and Florence, two of Europe’s most important metropolises. By contrast, little is known about healthcare in rural areas. Most studies of urban medicine have assumed that town-based medical practitioners primarily concentrated on serving their immediate market and did not reach out into the countryside to any significant extent. As a consequence, it has often been assumed that people living outside towns — the majority of the population of England at this time — were largely reliant on informal, irregular and charitable provision, particularly parish clergy or benevolent gentlewomen, an assumption reinforced by the appearance of case studies of the few such individuals for whom significant bodies of evidence have survived. In this chapter, an alternative model of rural medical provision is outlined, based upon extensive research into the consumption of medical services in Southern England between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. As shown below, town and country were medically interdependent, not distinctive arenas. Moreover, by tracking the location and usage of medical practitioners who sold their services to rural patients — essentially the supply side of the medical economy — we can observe how the shape and structure of this rural ‘medical marketplace’ shifted over time as rural-based practitioners begin to dominate provision in the early eighteenth century.