The Royal Doctors, 1485-1714: Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts (review)

Elizabeth Lane Furdell has drawn upon a rich collection of primary and secondary sources in order to assemble between the covers of one book this fascinating panoply of Tudor and Stuart elite medical practitioners. It is undoubtedly a remarkable achievement, covering, as it does, 330 years of medical history, and Furdell is to be congratulated on her painstaking research. Her approach is linear: starting with the reign of Henry VII and concluding with Queen Anne (not forgetting the Interregnum), we are introduced—through contemporary anecdotes, official State Papers, the Annals of the Royal College of Physicians of London, and many other important sources—to the hundreds of individuals responsible for the health of successive royal households. Revealing the influence of monarchs upon the fortunes of medicine in its often uncertain advance toward professional status, the careers of medical personnel are placed in their courtly and political contexts, and the religious and political implications of royal choices are considered in the light of the shifting authoritarian imperative of an unruly medical marketplace. Entire monarchical medical establishments are reviewed, wives and children frequently proving as interesting a source of medical preference as the head of the household.

Each practitioner is given as full a biography as possible, and his (and occasionally her) contribution to the household explained. Inevitably, however, the relative paucity of material about those who are less well known tips the balance in favor of the luminaries of any period. Omissions in a work as inclusive as this are sometimes surprising. For example, a generous account of the career of James I's physician William Harvey is to be expected, but the exclusion of Robert Fludd is hard to explain: Fludd—member of the College of Physicians, Rosicrucian mystic, Paracelsian physician to James I—urged Harvey to publish De motu cordis.The Royal Doctors deals with royal patronage writ large, and one regrets a missed opportunity to introduce the question of puzzling royal choices, and the accommodation within one royal household of apparently incompatible medical worldviews.

The important matter of therapeutics is generously covered. Gardeners, apothecaries, herbalists, alchemists, and iatrochemists are included in the survey, and respond as energetically as do their senior colleagues to the struggle for the professional, ideological, and confessional control of medical provision. However, the therapeutic value of certain treatments frequently escapes historians of medicine, and thus we hear of Henry, Prince of Wales, enduring a cloven cock being applied to the soles of his feet and newly killed pigeons being laid over his body, and we learn of the heroic sufferings of Queen Anne as her head was shaved and she was bled, cupped, and blistered innumerable times. There is a generous number of intriguing recipes ranging from the herbal to the chemical, and an important consideration of the role of the official pharmacopoeia in introducing (via an often conservative College of Physicians) new treatments and remedies.

The Royal Doctors is an invaluable source of reference without being a reference book. The enduring nature of Galenism, the rise of Paracelsianism, the role of the universities in the education of medical personnel, and the struggle for medical authority at a very transitional time in the history of English medicine are, inter alia, considered within a courtly context. Inevitably the author has had to make choices (including those of now-contested terminology: "scientific revolution," "syphilis"), but we are more than compensated for any disappointments by the richness of her material and her appreciation of the multifaceted nature of royal influence upon the history of medicine.