Introduction

The papers in this section address a common question: how likely were sick people in early modern Europe to seek care from a medical practitioner? The evidence they present reveals a level of engagement with commercial medical provision that varied substantially across Europe but that, for the most part, shared one striking characteristic: growth. While the likelihood that someone would turn to a medical practitioner for help was markedly higher in the urban Mediterranean than in the countryside of North West Europe, in all three of the locations that these papers study we see the use of care rising over the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. In short, people across Europe grew ever more reliant on commercial medical practitioners—individuals earning a living from their work in health care— in the early modern period. These findings substantially advance our understanding of developments in medical consumption over time. By shifting attention from goods to services, they provide a major complement to our understanding of consumption more generally. And they also present us with the challenge of explaining how these profound shifts in the medical economy connected with and contributed to wider economic, social, and cultural developments.

Consumption (sociology) · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Health care · Medical care · Period (music) · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Work (physics) · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Medicine · Nursing

• Intercambio de saberes y encuentros entre las prácticas médicas indígenas y españolas durante el primer siglo de Conquista española en Chile

  Open Access•Maude Lapierre, Matthias Gloël•Fronteras de la historia•2022

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• The Medical World of Early Modern France

  Winfried Schleiner•Sixteenth Century Journal•1999

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• Sufferers and Healers

  Margaret Pelling, Lucinda Mccray Beier•The Economic History Review•1989

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• Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century

  Gerald L Geison, Charles Webster•The Journal of Interdisciplinary…•1982

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• The Disappearance of the Sick-Man from Medical Cosmology, 1770-1870

  Open Access•Nick Jewson, N D Jewson•Sociology•1976

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