ABSTRACT

The new trend of the last few years to revisit the great intellectual controversies of the Enlightenment, reacting to the long primacy of the so-called new ‘social history’, has, incipiently at least, called into question the long-standing tendency among medical historians to avoid the problem posed by the fact that some Enlightenment physicians thought there had been a ‘medical revolution’. For this new trend focuses attention on the powerfully guiding social role of philosophy and philosophical debate and drastically revises still prevailing notions in the historiography about the concept of ‘revolution’.1 By highlighting the social impact of such debates this new tendency renders more relevant than has generally been supposed the pervasive early Enlightenment preoccupation with grounding far-reaching medical reform primarily on philosophical ideas. The shift also, of course, generates a new problematic as regards the relationship between medicine and religion in the Enlightenment era.