Description: In practice medical practitioners, especially physicians and surgeons, have always had to learn some type of detachment or dispassion. To elucidate what was medical dispassion in seventeenth and eighteenth century England, how and why it was taught, to whom, and in what spaces, each chapter of this book examines a community of practitioners and explores different patterns of medical education, clinical practice, social institutions, and philosophical and religious ideas.
Review Quotes: 'This book raises more questions than it answers, but is a fine and richly textured work of scholarship. Payne is to be applauded for opening up a complex and fascinating topic and striking an original and revealing path through it.' Sixteenth Century Journal