ABSTRACT
In the late 1630s, Lazare Rivière, professor at the University of Montpellier, delivered a series of lectures on practical medicine. Requests from physicians all over Europe prompted Rivière to expand these to include the theory of diseases, and on this basis a Praxis medica cum theoria was printed in 1645. The work was hugely popular and was translated into French and English. This chapter traces a journey of knowledge from university settings into early modern homes via London as the political and printing center of a public or “commonwealth”–serving medicine that was also domestic medicine. Three crucial stages of this journey are examined: codification of lectures into print; transformation from Latin textbook to vernacular handbook; reader engagement and appropriation. These stages comprise an epistemic itinerary by which knowledge forms as small as a one-line recipe and as large as a multi-volume work become entangled through book production, reading, and writing. Historians have recently argued that reading and writing practices can transform knowledge. This chapter demonstrates the value of examining the routes and stops along which—and the projected and actual communities in which—this happens.
