Medical Practitioners in Early Modern England

This talk will describe the ongoing project Early Modern Practitioners, to be found online at https://practitioners.exeter.ac.uk/, which develops the work undertaken by Peter Elmer and Jonathan Barry for a Wellcome Trust award on The Medical World of Early Modern England, Wales and Ireland c.1500-1715.

We will discuss the issues surrounding the identification of medical practitioners and the reasons for deciding to present this material in the form of biographical registers of practitioner careers, organised by county, rather than by other forms of database.

We will then consider how these registers might be used to analyse changes in medical practice (such as the numbers and proportions of different types pf practitioner in different places), and to establish networks of medical practitioners and how these related not only to differing forms of medical theory/practice, but also to wider political, religious and intellectual movements in which medical practitioners often played an important role.