Medicine before Science

This is a fascinating history of medical education and practice from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and is essentially the story of the relationship of medicine to Aristotle's natural philosophy and the ways in which it came apart following the contributions of the likes of Descartes and Harvey in the 17th century. Such 'learned and rational' doctors were brilliantly satirised by Moliere in two of his plays. The book traces the origins of Western medicine in Hippocrates and Galen, moving on to the Latin tradition of the Middle Ages and the crisis of theory and its resolutions in the new mechanical philosophy. The author combines erudition with a lively style in a book that should be read by anyone wishing to understand the history of medicine.