Physic and divinity : the case of Dr John Downes (1627-1694)

This article examines casebooks and papers penned by the Anglican physician Dr John Downes. His manuscripts highlight how a physician’s faith informed their occupational practices in day-to-day life. Considered alongside the writings of other physicians, the study provides a rich sense of doctors’ vocational duties, and elucidates how much of this activity was expressed within religious frameworks. Early modern histories about the faith of physicians operate largely in the field of intellectual history. Furthermore, the assumption that secular medical interventions gradually supplanted religious responses to illness remains influential. Here, I shift our gaze from the intellectual to the everyday, and argue that faith remained fundamental in many physicians’ approaches to their lives, and their work. In this way, the article explores intricate relationships between religion and medicine in the seventeenth century, and seeks to underline the importance of studying histories of religion and medicine in conjunction