Thomas Willis and the fevers literature of the seventeenth century

Abstract

WE NEED not take literally the "common Adagy Nemo sine febri moritur," even for seventeenth-century England.' Nor is it likely that Fevers put "a period to the lives of most men".2Nevertheless, the prevalence and importance of this "sad, comfortless, truculent disease" in those times cannot be doubted.Thomas Willis thought that Fevers had accounted for about a third of the deaths of mankind up to his day, and his contemporary and compatriot, if not his friend, Thomas Sydenham, guessed that two- thirds of deaths which were not due to violence were the result of that "army of pestiferous diseases", Fevers.3These estimates are, of course, based almost entirely on impressions.4But such impressions form the subject of this paper, for it is the contemporary Fevers literature upon which I wish to focus attention, the literature covering little more than a century following the death of the influential Jean Fernel in 1558.In what follows, I shall poke around in, rather than survey, the site in which this literature rests, trying to stake out, however disjointedly and incompletely, something of the intellectual, social, and natural setting in which it was produced.In keeping with the spirit of this volume, this is no more than an exploratory essay of a vast territory and, even so, to make it manageable, I have restricted myself largely to *

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