The Dying and the Doctors

This is an important book for the social history of medicine, but not necessarily for the reasons given by the author and subsequent reviewers. It has been flagged as providing evidence for a ‘profound revolution’ whereby dying people increasingly looked to doctors in their final illness, and placed much greater demands on practitioners as a consequence. I can suggest some problems with this analysis, but can also offer some alternative reasons for seeing this research as highly significant. Ian Mortimer has surveyed the probate accounts for East Kent, the region with the best surviving collection of such material, and abstracted all references to medical advice, services, materials and attendance to the dying, whether supplied by the most high-status male physician or the lowliest local body who could be hired for ‘keeping’ the terminally ill. This entailed reading over two and a half thousand accounts, which were broken down and assessed according to thirty-year periods covering 1570–1719 (with the years 1650–9 omitted for methodological reasons), and the wealth of the deceased, so that change over time and in relation to different social groups could be considered. The result is a highly persuasive set of evidence which suggests that, in East Kent, the demand for medical attention of all kinds on behalf of the dying increased by two or even three times, notably after the Restoration, and that this was the case across all social groups and in all geographical locations. This gives rise to the inevitable conclusion that limited financial means did not necessarily restrict the drive towards medical resources (although it may have constrained the nature of medical provision purchased) and that rural remoteness was no barrier to medicine. Thus, it is claimed, Mortimer’s data ‘confirm and provide a measurement of what many social historians have long suspected’ (p. 41)

Attendance · Genealogy · Political science · Probate · Reading (process · Relation (database · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · History of Medicine Studies · Law · Medicine