Piety and the patient: Medicine and religion in eighteenth century Bristol

Abstract

In the concluding chapter of Religion and the Decline of Magic Keith Thomas describes the ‘decline of magic’ after 1660, replaced by a range of practical, scientific and medical methods to counter, or at least mitigate, the uncertainties of life, amongst which illness was the most persistent. Historians of medicine have generally endorsed Thomas' view that medical remedies grew in importance in the eighteenth century, at the expense of religious or magical means of healing. In and around the towns at least the qualified medical man replaced the minister as the chief healer, whilst patent medicines, endorsed by medical men, proliferated at the expense of home-made cures. In the key areas of witchcraft and mental illness moral and religious explanations of disease gave way, in official circles at least, to more secular, materialistic accounts. Thomas suggests that such developments resulted in a widening gap between popular and elite notions, as the rural poor clung to their traditional remedies and magical beliefs, now dismissed as vulgar superstitions by the educated. Thomas and other historians have been more confident in describing this process than in explaining it. Thomas rightly dismisses the notion that medicine or science had decisively demonstrated their superiority, concluding that ‘in medicine as elsewhere, therefore, supernatural theories went out before effective techniques came in’. Thomas is forced to suggest, tentatively, a revolution of aspirations, linked to a new scientific worldview.

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