The Medical Marketplace

Abstract

In the mid-1980s, a number of Anglophone historians began to describe health care in early modern England as a ‘medical marketplace’ or ‘medical market’. These terms were foregrounded by several scholars more or less simultaneously. The opening chapter of Lucinda Beier’s 1984 Ph.D. thesis (published in 1987) was entitled ‘The Medical Marketplace’.1 In 1985, Roy Porter wrote of the premodern ‘medical market place’ ‘where physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries … melted into each other along a spectrum that included thousands who dispensed medicine full- or parttime’,2 and Irvine Loudon observed that one of the most important unresolved areas of eighteenth-century medicine was ‘the extent of the market for medical care and how that market was satisfied’.3 The following year Harold Cook’s Decline of the Old Medical Regime began with a chapter entitled ‘The Medical Marketplace’.4 This terminology was not confined to scholars working on the United Kingdom. Katherine Park’s Doctors and Medicine in Early Modern Florence (1985) contained an identically entitled chapter.5

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