For fifty years, Theodore Turquet de Mayerne served as a royal physician in France and then in England. Historians have long recognised him as a brilliant practitioner and chemical Galenist, but this book is the first major study of his remarkable Latin casebooks, the ‘Ephemerides Morborum’ (Diaries of Disease). Interpreting the casebooks in the light of Mayerne's own theoretical writings and of contemporaries such as Jean Fernel, the book is a cultural history of medical perception. It shows how Mayerne crafted a medical portrait for his patients, moving from evaluation, through diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutics, and focuses on those moments when theory and practice merged to form an integrated medical outlook that served as the basis for action. Convinced that his innovations had the sanction of Galen and Hippocrates, Mayerne added chemical principles to humoral medicine, a greater empiricism to a more rational approach to medicine, and an interventionist therapeutics to a more cautious view of therapy, thus forging a complex synthesis that bore certain structural similarities to baroque culture and art.
Nance
Turquet de Mayerne as Baroque Physician jetzt bestellen!
Weitere Infos & Material
Tables and Figures
Abbreviations
Acknowledgments
Preface: ‘The Most Difficult Thing’
1 A Physician’s Life: A Brief Thematic Biography
2 Constructing the Casebooks
3 The Past: Evaluating the Patient
4 The Past: Determining the Patient’s Temperament
5 The Present: What is a Disease?
6 The Present: Mayerne's Diagnosis in Social Context
7 The Future: Prognosis
8 The Future: Therapeutics
9 The Death of Prince Henry
10 Mayerne as Baroque Physician
Appendix 1: A Guide to the Ephemerides morborum
Appendix 2: Entries by Year and Type
Bibliography
Index
Brian Nance lives in Myrtle Beach, SC and is Associate Professor of History at Coastal Carolina University. He is interested in the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe.
