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Reviewed by:
  • Physicians, Surgeons, and Apothecaries: Medical Practice in Seventeenth-Century Edinburgh
  • Lisa Rosner
Helen M. Dingwall. Physicians, Surgeons, and Apothecaries: Medical Practice in Seventeenth-Century Edinburgh. Scottish Historical Review Monograph, no. 1. East Linton, Scotland: Tuckwell Press, 1995. 262 pp. Ill. £25.00.

Much has been written on medicine in Edinburgh in the eighteenth century, but very little on it in the seventeenth—a disproportion that Helen Dingwall sets out to redress. She contends that many aspects of eighteenth-century medicine, such as the emphasis on education, on proper qualifications, and on a concern for poor as well as rich patients, were already present in the preceding century. All of [End Page 152] these, she argues, show that seventeenth-century medical practitioners had already taken important steps toward professionalization.

Dingwall’s study focuses primarily on the two best-organized medical groups, the surgeons and physicians, though she also examines the much more shadowy figures of the apothecaries. A particular strength of the study is her imaginative use of sources, which has allowed her to tease information on the history of medicine from tax rolls, wills, court records, and port books. We hear about the wrongdoing of a surgeon’s apprentice “going to taverns and buying drink and to baikhouses and buying pyes schort bread and rolls” (p. 66), the books named by a physician in his will “from Hippocrates to Hoffman . . . Dryden’s plays . . . and Mrs Baynes’ Novels” (p. 144), and the “7 small barrells and one chist of drogues and violl stringes” (p. 195) imported by an apothecary. Dingwall’s book serves to remind historians of medicine how much they can learn from nonmedical sources.

Yet this book is often maddening. Dingwall has read very sparingly in the scholarly literature on the history of medicine, and often appears to be approaching her sources cold. Nearly every chapter cries out for additional research to establish the context for her sources: on the educational traditions for surgeons and physicians in guilds and universities outside the British isles, on the continuities and changes in medical and surgical practice from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, on the professionalization of medicine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anachronisms abound: an exhortation to a newly admitted member of the surgeon’s guild in 1605 to be “diligent to attend to ferder knowledge” is rendered as an “early focus on the need for post-graduate study” (p. 85); a practitioner called to a street accident involving two “bairns” with broken legs and skull injuries is described as administering “paediatric treatment” (p. 153); payment to a physician’s wife for “some particulars to cause [a woman] to conceave with child” is described as an “infertility clinic,” perhaps taking place in her husband’s “consulting room” (p. 198). Dingwall has chosen to retain the original Scots of many of her sources because it is, she notes, “particularly vivid and evocative” (p. x); those sources would be better served if she had recognized that the language of the history of medicine, too, is vivid, evocative, and historically specific.

Dingwall’s topic is an important one, and her book should be of interest to scholars in the social history of medicine. Without more research than is furnished by this book, however, the reader cannot draw a firm conclusion regarding her contentions. The only verdict possible is the distinctively Scots one, Not proven.

Lisa Rosner
Richard Stockton College
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