Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (review)

Harold Cook, director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine and professor at University College London, is the author of several books and many more articles on the history of medicine and science in seventeenth-century England. In Matters of Exchange, Professor Cook moves across the channel to focus on the Netherlands and, in doing so, suggests a fundamental revision to traditional understandings of the so-called Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Max Weber accounted for this revolution by the growth of capitalism, but linked religion as well by reference to the 'Protestant work ethic'; Robert Merton suggested more precisely that it was English Puritanism which drove commerce and the growth of early modern science. Subsequent scholarship has critiqued this notion of religious causation, thereby shifting emphasis away from economic factors. Cook's account puts economic history front and centre again, arguing that Dutch commerce played a key role in the changes that early modern science underwent. But Cook's story is more complex and nuanced than that, as it integrates social, political, and intellectual history along with economic history.

It is this tripartite approach, and the geographic shift to the Low Countries, which will ensure Matters of Exchange is read, critiqued, and praised by a generation or more of scholars of the early modern period. The preface and the first two chapters contextualise the study in the Dutch Golden Age, an era when the Netherlands by necessity created a culture and economy based on trade and exchange in the 'first age of global commerce' (p. 1). Cook also introduces some key concepts to understanding the argument in the remainder of the book. The first of these is the notion of the 'passions', the early modern concept of forces that create changes in minds and bodies, as well as in things (p. xii). In Cook's view, 'passions' for goods shaped collective behaviour and belief (p. xii). 'Goods' also takes on multivalent meanings for Cook: valued objects were goods in both a moral and a material sense, while goods of commerce embodied that particular kind of epistemology which privileged knowledge via the senses and experience, as opposed to 'reasoned knowledge' (p. 16). Therefore, Cook is able to speak of the further notion of 'objectivity' as a kind of knowledge being cultivated in this early modern period which emphasised a detailed acquaintance with objects (p. 20). Also important for understanding his argument is Cook's emphasis on 'exchange', which 'began from the precise knowledge of things that came via personal experience, but also included the ability to transform one value into another' (p. 42). Cook uses these concepts to argue that Dutch commerce in the seventeenth century fostered an intellectual and cultural pursuit of the 'detailed and exacting description of natural objects' (p. 1), manifest particularly through the natural sciences and medicine, which led to the founding of the 'big science of the early modern period' (p. 410).

This argument emerges only gradually and episodically, however, via the seven chapters comprising the body of the book. Each is devoted to the various individual naturalists, anatomists, and physicians whose achievements exemplified these 'ways of knowing valued most highly by the merchant-rulers of urban Europe' (p. 40). They include the botanist Carolus Clusius, the naturalist and collector Bernardus Boerhaave, Jacobus Bontius in the areas of medicine and natural history, René Descartes (although not himself Dutch, he was a long-time resident there) on anatomy, the physician Willem ten Rhijne and his use of medical practices originating in Japan and China, the medical professor Hermann Boerhaave, and the physician Bernard Mandeville. In each case, Cook's richly-drawn accounts rely on copious Dutch-language manuscript and primary sources not readily available to English-speaking scholars, as well as a vast array of secondary texts; indeed, this work is the product of...