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

Elizabeth Lane Furdell. The Royal Doctors 1485–1714: Medical Personnel at the Tudor and Stuart Courts. Rochester, New York, University of Rochester Press, 2001. x, 305 pp. $65.

In The Royal Doctors Elizabeth Lane Furdell studies medical care at the English royal courts from the reign of Henry VII through the death of Anne. She is to be commended for putting together the first book to consider collectively the hundreds of practitioners who attended the royal body. As in all aspects of court life, the vagaries of royal personal preference could make all the difference when it came to the world of court medicine. So although physicians and surgeons predominate, the traditional medical division of labor was routinely compromised whenever monarchs chose to favor unorthodox healers. Consequently, alongside such prominent figures as William Harvey, we find empirics of all sorts, male and female midwives, occultists, and even a few outright quacks tending to the kings and queens of England.

One of Furdell’s primary goals is to investigate the care provided by the royal doctors to England’s monarchs. Thus the stories of sovereigns’ various births, ailments, and deaths are all here and will be of interest to medical historians as well as those studying the royal lives. The Royal Doctors contains a wealth of information on monarch’s periods of sickness, as well as on the wide range of diagnostic and therapeutic practices witnessed at the court. There are many good stories here, and Furdell tells them well. Unfortunately, the records only yield so much, and at points the reader must work through somewhat dry details of lesser medical figures about whom little can be said, since little is known. But that effort is rewarded.

Furdell demonstrates that royal doctors did not waste the opportunity to use their position at court to further their own careers or to weigh in on matters affecting the broader medical world. Furdell shows that this exerted an historically important effect on wider English medicine. The clearest examples comes in chapter two when she demonstrates how royal doctors acted as courtiers, securing the patronage of Henry VIII for such endeavors as the Royal College of Physicians and the Barber-Surgeons Company. In this way The Royal Doctors marks an intersection where medical history and court history meet, and as such it will be of interest to scholars in both fields. At certain points, as when Dr. Robert Brady was called upon to testify to the legitimacy of James II’s newborn son, royal doctors found themselves at the heart of intense political controversy. However, it should be said that Furdell seems more interested in royal practitioners as doctors than as courtiers. The examples of doctors’ politics explored here touch almost exclusively on issues related directly to medicine. Broader political actions of court doctors receive far less attention. Furdell well demonstrates that doctors frequently had enviable access to the inner reaches of the royal household. Yet court historians may be slightly disappointed that we too rarely learn how they used their position to advance their wider political agendas. Similarly, those interested in the powerful mediators of symbolism and ceremony that pervaded most every aspect of court life will not find extensive analysis of the ritual elements of court medicine.

Given the self-evidently interesting nature of her project, Furdell seems unnecessarily defensive about her undertaking in her conclusion. She laments that her style of scholarship on “elite” medicine has fallen into disfavor, overtaken by scholars who focus on “ordinary practitioners and their patients,” who, she notes, concentrate on such issues “for political or publishing reasons” (p. 254). This was unfortunate, primarily because a patient-centered perspective would complement her project so well. Some may respond with the criticism that such issues as the doctor-patient relationship at the court receive too...