often negotiated care. If Christine Stevenson

and Adams present different views of hospital

architecture, form and function, both reveal

how hospital design and representation were

informed by cultural concerns, while

Rawcliffe presents a rich account of how

patronage and the pursuit of salvation were

incorporated into the material fabric of

medieval hospitals.

Inevitably, with any collection of essays,

there are gaps and not all readers will be

satisfied. As the editors make clear, the history

of non-western hospitals is often neglected and

this is true of this volume. Nor is a much

needed up-to-date assessment of the

historiography provided. There are weaknesses

in some chapters: for example, Matthew

Sneider in describing the financial strategies

adopted by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

hospitals in Bologna is too closely focused on

the institutional context, whilst Onger’s search

for the growth of a hospital network in the

Brescian region is built on the uncertain

assumption that one should exist. However, if

the collection does not have the same

groundbreaking credentials as The hospital in
history, it demonstrates that hospital history
should no longer be considered institutional

history alone; that the field has much to offer

medical historians, and that hospitals, as

Rawcliffe explains, are “mirrors of society”.

Keir Waddington,

Cardiff University

Ole Peter Grell and Andrew

Cunningham (eds), Medicine and religion in
Enlightenment Europe, The History of
Medicine in Context, Aldershot, Ashgate,

2007, pp. ix, 267, illus, £55.00 (hardcover 978-

0-7546-5638-8).

This collection is one of several volumes by

the same editors on the relations between

medicine and religion in early modern Europe,

including Medicine and the reformation
(London, Routledge, 1993) and ‘Religio
medici’: medicine and religion in seventeenth-

century England (Aldershot, Scolar Press,
1996). Through its presentation by Andrew

Cunningham and thirteen chapters by fourteen

other contributors, the volume provides the

reader with a tapestry of topics and questions

concerning the intersections between medical

practice and knowledge and Christianity, in

different European countries on both sides of

the religious divide between Roman Catholic

and Protestant (Portugal, Spain, Naples, Rome,

France, Bavaria and other German countries,

the Netherlands, Denmark, England and

Scotland). Yet, territorial borders in most

chapters often fade as a result of a fluid

circulation of the writings instrumental to the

debates as much as of their agents’ mobility.

The range of topics is wide. While Jonathan

I Israel focuses on the impact of the Dutch

radical Enlightenment—freethinking and

atheist followers of Descartes and

Spinoza—on medical thought in the

Netherlands and, by exportation, in London,

Germany and Denmark, Peter Elmer

emphasizes the amazingly limited influence

that this philosophical radicalism had in post-

Restoration England on the religious views of

nonconformist physicians who, although most

had been trained in the Netherlands, were even

prepared to believe in witchcraft. A wide

exploration of physicians’ library lists, both

printed and manuscript, leads L W B Brockliss

to claim that a moderate Catholic

Enlightenment prevailed in the French medical

community in contrast to the frequent

association of the Enlightenment with

religious scepticism and even atheism.

Some peculiarities of the Enlightenment in

Naples and Scotland are explored by Maria

Conforti’s and John Henry’s essays. While the

former deals with the intermingling of

religion, philosophy and history in the

historico-medical narratives by seventeenth-

and eighteenth-century Neapolitan physicians,

the latter focuses on the religious rationale

behind the Scottish Common Sense school of

philosophy whose followers used their

analysis of the nature of the mind and its

operations to guarantee the certainties of the

scientific approach in the path of Newtonian

458

Book Reviews

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300004245
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:39:31, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300004245
https://www.cambridge.org/core


natural philosophy and laws of nature, so as to

combat scepticism and irreligiosity by proving

the existence of God through demonstrations

of the laws of the mind.

Two other essays focus on images of

anatomy, and natural history and materia
medica in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century Netherlands. Rina Knoeff

comparatively analyses the conceptions and

moral lessons of perfection in the anatomical

atlases by the Mennonite Govard Bidloo

(1685) and the Calvinist Siegfried Albinus

(1734). Benjamin Schmidt focuses on the

peculiarities of the ideological strategy

(exoticism, universal knowledge, priority of

pleasure and delight) followed by authors,

illustrators and publishers of naturalistic works

from the non-European world under Dutch

control (mostly the East Indies).

Iberian Enlightenments are targeted by two

more essays. Timothy Walker emphasizes

Portuguese state-licensed medical

practitioners’ conspicuous role as experts in

the service of the Inquisition, and the

paradoxical convergence between their fight

against popular healing culture and the

Catholic Church’s struggle against magic and

sorcery. While the essay by José Pardo-Tomás

and Àlvar Martı́nez-Vidal discusses secular

and regular clergymen’s moralist contributions

to the Spanish debates on birth care (including

performing baptism on a dying infant), and

their support for the professional

legitimization of the emerging practice of

male midwifery surgeons to the detriment of

that of traditional midwives.

The remaining essays are focused on case

studies of miracles, exorcisms and sanctity

that illustrate Enlightenment interactions of

new medicine and its practitioners with

Catholicism in the context of Europe where

religious division was still relevant. Robert

Jütte revisits the French and German

Enlightenment debates on the medical miracle

of the “golden tooth” that was allegedly grown

by a Silesian boy in 1593. Through the case of

a Franciscan friar who levitated during his

ecstasies and was beatified by Benedict XIV,

Catrien Santing shows the limits of the

modernizing and rationalizing agenda of an

“Enlightenment pope” who aimed to use new

medical and natural philosophical scholarship

for purifying and reinforcing the Catholic

Church. Claudia Stein explores the

peculiarities of Bavarian Catholic

Enlightenment by dealing with an apparently

successful healing through exorcism (1774)

performed on a daughter of Johann Anton von

Wolter—the favourite physician of

Maximilian III Joseph of Bavaria—and the

reactions of a variety of witnesses. And Ole

Peter Grell focuses on the spiritual journey

from Lutheranism to Catholicism of the

Danish anatomists Nicolaus Steno and his

grand-nephew Jacob Winsløw, by

emphasizing the seminal role played in both

conversions by Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet in

the fervent intellectual atmosphere of Counter-

Reformation Paris.

In sum, this valuable volume underlines

firstly, the persistence of the religious

rationale in Enlightenment Europe and its

relevance for medicine and medical

practitioners; secondly, the plurality of

meanings and registers of this cultural

movement, from its radical version to the

multiplicity of more moderate Protestant and

Catholic Enlightenments; and thirdly, a

number of features (miracles and conversions,

mostly) that fed religious polemic between

both sides of the major early modern Christian

schism.

Jon Arrizabalaga,

CSIC-IMF, Barcelona

Marion Maria Ruisinger, Patientenwege.
Die Konsiliarkorrespondenz Lorenz Heisters
(1683–1758) in der Trew-Sammlung Erlangen,
Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte, Beiheft

28, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner, 2008, pp. 308,

e43.00 (paperback 978-3-515-08806-0).

For more than twenty years medical history

has been paying greater attention to the people

for whom medical thought, action and effort is

carried out—the patients. Primary sources,

459

Book Reviews

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300004245
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Carnegie Mellon University, on 06 Apr 2021 at 01:39:31, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at

https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025727300004245
https://www.cambridge.org/core