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Christi Sumich. Divine Doctors and Dreadful Distempers: How Practicing Medicine Became a Respectable Profession. Clio Medica: Perspectives in Medical Humanities, 91. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013. 312 pp. Ill. $95.00 (978-90-420-3688-8).
A wide range of healers promoted their procedures and cures in seventeenth-cen- tury England. Physicians differentiated themselves from the competition, in part, by their accreditations. Physicians possessed university degrees. But most patients in early modern England could not afford a physician's fee. Others sought help from unlicensed or nonlearned healers who provided the same treatments as their elite counterparts. Why, then, would anyone choose to see a physician at all? This intriguing question guides Sumich's research, and she answers it by exploring how physicians appropriated ideas about morality to fashion themselves as experts. By grounding their theories and treatments in providence and divine retribution, seventeenth-century physicians cultivated moral authority and accrued clientele in a crowded, competitive market.
The first half of the book addresses prevailing negative stereotypes of physicians as greedy and atheistic. Sumich addresses the ways physicians drew...