Casebooks in Early Modern England: Medicine, Astrology, and Written Records

Abstract

summaryCasebooks are the richest sources that we have for encounters between early modern medical practitioners and their patients. This article compares astrological and medical records across two centuries, focused on England, and charts developments in the ways in which practitioners kept records and reflected on their practices. Astrologers had a long history of working from particular moments, stellar configurations, and events to general rules. These practices required systematic notation. Physicians increasingly modeled themselves on Hippocrates, recording details of cases as the basis for reasoned expositions of the histories of disease. Medical records, as other scholars have demonstrated, shaped the production of medical knowledge. Instead, this article focuses on the nature of casebooks as artifacts of the medical encounter. It establishes that casebooks were serial records of practice, akin to diaries, testimonials, and registers; identifies extant English casebooks and the practices that led to their production and preservation; and concludes that the processes of writing, ordering, and preserving medical records are as important for understanding the medical encounter as the records themselves.

The Roots and Ramifications of Narrative in Modern Medicine

“…27 Although the notion of a clinical case as an entity is clearly discernible in the Hippocratic era, 28 the historians of science, Volker Hess and Andrew Mendelsohn, argue that case reports attain their modern form as authoritative accounts only in the eighteenth century, when cases begin to be written about as more or less free-standing 'collections of observable data' linked to specifi c individuals. 29 Prior to this period, case materials were much more diffusely embedded and distributed in texts than they are today. Clinical casebooks and compendia mingled elements from earlier with those of later observations, the patient's medical history being recounted in terms of precepts and doctrines that did not necessarily distinguish between fi rst-and second-hand observations and commentary.…”

“…The invention of medical instruments yielded information novel to clinical texts grounded in traditional templates -diaries, commonplaces and testimonials -including sounds heard through the stethoscope, interior appearances made visible by the ophthalmoscope, and temperature levels read off the thermometer. 37 Hess and Mendelsohn chart the ways in which medical texts began to tabulate and graph information along new dimensions and axes, 'from particular narratives to a general narrative -from histories of patients to the general . .…”

Read. Do. Observe. Take note!

“…48 See, for example, Dupré, 2017;Smith, 2010Smith, , 2012 http://www.makingandknowing.org/ 50 Harkness, 2007. 51 Hess & Mendelsohn, 2010;Kassell, 2014;Stolberg, 2013bStolberg, , 2016 Stolberg, 2016. 53 Stolberg, 2013aStolberg, , 2014 On casebooks, particularly those of Simon Forman (1552-1611) and Richard Napier (1559-1634), see Kassell, 2014.…”

“…On casebooks, particularly those of Simon Forman (1552‐1611) and Richard Napier (1559‐1634), see Kassell, .…”

Precision Medicine: Data and Discovery for Improved Health and Therapy

“…When Hippocrates espoused the idea that physicians should be literate and keep records of patient care and outcomes 16 , it was so that these records might be used to improve the understanding of disease and help future patients. It is therefore not a new idea that medical records might be a powerful source of data for advancing biomedicine; the widespread use of electronic medical records systems has allowed several researchers in this session to use these data to deepen our understandings of disease and possible new methods of precision treatment.…”