ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about what exposure to medicine, especially anatomy and surgery, did to some men in early modern England. In the exhaustive study of hospital medicine, Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners in Eighteenth-Century London, Susan Lawrence states that such attitudes were as old as systematic medical practice itself. Religious developments from the 1640s provided a new basis for accepting anatomy not simply as a medical technique but as part of a broader, moral pursuit of knowledge. The English Civil War with its sectarian radicalism forged a new religious climate in the later seventeenth century that identified enthusiasm' and atheism' as public evils. Such concerns lent religious credence to the philosophical emphasis on discipline and reason that had already given anatomy a new place in public discussions of scientific knowledge.
