Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe (review)

The thirteen essays in this volume challenge and complicate the old perception of the Enlightenment as an antireligious movement and the even older convention that linked the medical profession with unbelief. The lead essay, by Jonathan Israel, the prominent historian of the radical Enlightenment—which he distinguishes from a dominant moderate Enlightenment—argues that a group of physicians influenced by Spinoza's materialism did, indeed, contribute to a "medical revolution" in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, rooted in science and philosophy (p. 28). The rest of the contributions, however, point in other directions. Peter Elmer shows how religiously nonconformist physicians who left England for the Netherlands after the Restoration of 1660 failed to internalize the message of philosophical radicalism, in large part, he suggests, because of their religious conservatism. Spinozism was inconsistent with their belief in the real existence of spirits, demons, and witches. A close analysis by Laurence Brockliss of the books owned by five eighteenth-century French physicians reveals only one (a Huguenot) with a taste for the more provocative works of the philosophes. Not that the others were necessarily anti-Enlightenment; Brockliss points to the role of a humanist Catholic Enlightenment, devoted to progress in this world as well as to Christianity.

Several contributions underscore the importance of religious belief for physicians and philosophers and the ways in which it interacted with their views on questions about medicine and the human body and mind. Rina Knoeff compares the anatomical atlases of Govard Bidloo and Bernard Siegfried Albinus, seeing Mennonite tendencies in the former's harsh depiction of cadavers and the influence of a Dutch Enlightenment blend of Calvinism and humanism in the latter's more positive images of the human body. Claudia Stein recounts the seemingly paradoxical story of an encounter between the enlightened Bavarian court physician Johann Anton von Wolter and the celebrated exorcist Johann Joseph Gaßner. Von Wolter sought help for his own daughter, who was suffering from convulsions. He emerged from the session with Gaßner convinced that the priest had worked a miraculous cure. Medical science could not explain it, and the results effectively refuted materialism. In contrast, Ferdinand Sterzinger, a priest of the Theatine order who accompanied von Wolter on his visit, argued that Gaßner's actions were inconsistent with Christian miraculous healing and attributed his effect on patients to some natural cause, such as a magnetic or electrical force. John Henry's chapter on psychology in the Scottish Enlightenment emphasizes the theological underpinnings of the theory of mind for thinkers such as Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart. The mind, which took over the function performed by the soul in earlier antimaterialist arguments, was governed by natural laws. Like Newton's laws of the physical universe, they were guaranteed by God and demonstrated his existence.

Two essays deal with symbiotic relationships between the clergy and the medical profession, founded on shared interests as much as beliefs. José Pardo-Tomás and Álvar Martinez-Vidal show how Spanish clergymen argued for increasing the role of surgically trained male accoucheurs because they trusted them more than midwives to administer baptism in cases of emergency. This consideration alone outweighed the indecency of having men attend women in childbirth, quite apart from any possible disparities in skill between the two groups of practitioners. Timothy Walker's study of the prominent role of physicians in the Inquisition in eighteenth-century Portugal points to a collaboration in which the clergy helped advance the goals of the medical profession. The latter instigated many of the Inquisition's prosecutions for superstitious healing.

This volume will be of interest not only to specialists but also to readers more broadly concerned with the cultural history of eighteenth-century Europe.