ABSTRACT
Medicine in the early modern period was characterized by heterogeneity of ideas, practices, and practitioners, generating productive debates and bitter disputes. This chapter describes the theories underpinning medical practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the economics of the expanding medical marketplace. It then turns to examine bodily disability and difference, arguing that medical attitudes toward bodily ‘anomaly’ reflected both cultural biases around bodily difference, and the increasing ambition of medical practitioners. On one hand, people with congenital disabilities, in particular, were often visually anatomized in medical works in which bodily difference was easily elided with monstrosity. On the other, many writings on impairment claimed to be able to restore the body to ‘wholeness’ with the use of surgery, physic, or prostheses. Overall, early modern medical writing displays a tension between viewing the body as an object of scrutiny and acknowledging the many ways in which it continued to elude human knowledge.
