The Medical World of Early Modern France (review)

A book this expensive and this long is not likely to attract many readers, however enticing the subject matter. Even specialists in the history of early modern medicine or of the French ancien regime will want to feel that the cost and time involved reading are justified, either because the book offers new insights, reformulates significant debates, reveals much that is not already known, or in some other way livens up the field.

Although plenty of new information is served up here, and the authors are both fine scholars with established reputations in precisely this field, it is not at all clear that this book works. Part of the problem is that the two have quite distinct writing styles—one methodical, one flamboyant—and the contrast between the sections is rather jarring. Also, the organization of the book is convoluted and makes for quite a bit of overlap and repetition. “The Enlightenment,” for example, is both a brief section (C) of Chapter 6 and the whole next Chapter (7) “The Sick and Their Practitioners” is both a whole chapter in Part I (5) and also a section (E) of Chapter 8 in Part II. But most importantly, the subject matter would have been better served if the authors had exercised more restraint. Most writers fall in love with their material, but most also fight the urge to present every last morsel, and instead discriminate and distil. Here, as the introduction boasts, we have a book built on an archival foundation that is “unusually broad...unusually deep...unusually rich (p.7),” but the steady barrage of anectdotes and minutiae culled from these archives is numbing. The authors claim to open up a world “which historians have barely suspected,” and they call attention to the “breadth of their conceptual apparatus” (p.33). But the original arguments sink from sight in the sea of details, forcing the authors to reiterate them (over and over!) in an effort to keep them afloat. The result is repetitive, organizationally cumbersome, and inexcusably lengthy. The famous apology from the sender of a long letter because he didn’t have the time to write a short one comes to mind here.

That the effort of Brockliss and Jones—both active contributors to this field for many years—backfires here really is a pity, because it means that this book will probably be used as a sort of encyclopedia rather than a contribution to large and compelling historiographical controversies. What could have been a new and elegant revisiting of a subject colonized by Foucault will probably instead become a reference tool. Readers are sure to mine the extensively detailed index, maps, charts, tables, footnotes and bibliography for choice tidbits on the particular doctor or midwife, region of France, period, or illness that interests them, but they are unlikely to start at the beginning and follow the argument, because the argument gets drowned and can not evolve in an intellectually satisfying way.

The authors suggest a new vocabulary to replace the polarization of the high/low, elite/popular, licit/illicit medical dichotomy. Taking issue with Matthew Ramsey’s formulation, they substitute for it an image of a core, or corporate medical community of trained physicians, surgeons and apothecaries, surrounded by a medical “penumbra” composed of colorful irregular healers. Emphasizing that the membrane between these groups becomes increasingly permeable across the nearly three centuries studied, they argue that the sick of all classes had choices and access to many different kinds of medical practitioners when they were in need, and did not stigmatize the increasingly influential charlatans of “Quack Street.” Despite fierce efforts on the part of the core (or corps) to safeguard their turf and monopolize medical authority—by virtue of more rigorous qualifications, royal patronage and licensing, statist claims of legitimacy, or patriotic devotion—this was a system in dynamic flux, with lots of traffic across the divide, a “unitary” rather than a “bifurcated” medical universe, increasingly shaped by consumerism and...