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Europe of the 18th century was the cradle of a great intellectual revolution that cleared up the remainders of feudal anarchy and medieval dogmatism. At that period, characterized as Enlightenment and also called, sometimes, the Age of Reason, men began to believe that, applying immutable nature laws to politics, philosophy, ethics, religion and economy, they could construct the perfect society.
That was the age that divinized science, aiming at reducing all intellectual and moral processes to Newton's precise principles of matter, movement, space, time and force. By doing that, many talented men discovered basic data in chemistry and physics that indirectly benefited medicine.
In spite of many theories, the physician of the 18th century was a mark in the society, a respected erudite, a man of resources. Using elegant clothes and periwig, generally brought a cane set in gold.
Physicians lived as noblemen, dedicated to the arts of playing musical instruments and writing poems; in the country, they lived as knights. Many of them had excellent libraries and seriously studied other themes besides medicine. It was in that century that the tendency to specialization was born: cardiology originated in the work of Antonio Giuseppe Testa (1764-1814); in Germany, Paul Gottlieb Werlhof (1699-1767) set the basis of hematology with his original description of hemorrhagic purple.
Cardiac maladies earned special attention from two French clinicians: Jean de Senac recognized asthma, orthopnea, legs edema and hemoptysis as symptoms of cardiac diseases; Jean Nicholas Corvisart created the term carditis and was the first to self-denominate a heart expert.
Also in that century surgery finally got free from the chains that linked it to barbers and orthopedists. In the middle of the century, main universities from England, France and Germany offered cathedras in surgery; in the following decades surgeons got equal position to physicians. The century did not introduce any revolutionary therapy method: bleeding, cupping glasses and purgation continued in vogue; venereal diseases, unbridled in a libertine epoch, were still treated with massive doses of mercury, phlebotomy and therapeutic baths.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
31 Jan 2007 -
Date of issue
Dec 2006
