If social history were a series of landscapes, then the most dramatic terrain – the steepest mountains – would be found in the social history of medicine. The problems posed by severe illnesses, incapacity and death have led to the most profound social developments, affecting almost every aspect of human life. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are particularly important in this respect, and cannot be regarded as simply the low foothills before the steeper slopes of modern medical discoveries. Indeed, with regard to the acceptance of the need for a high-quality, regulated medical profession, the three centuries before the Apothecaries Act of 1815 were the steep slopes. However, if we question what people actually did when they were seriously ill at any given time in this period, we run into problems. There is a dearth of primary source material for measuring change. As a consequence, the process whereby society became medicalised – in the sense that individuals regularly sought professional medical solutions to serious illnesses and ailments rather than spiritual or amateur nursing help – remains vague and relatively unexplored.

Most previous attempts to map out the process of medicalisation have either been narratives of one of the three main branches of the medical profession (physicians, surgeons and apothecaries) or studies of the symptoms of the change (examinations of the developing outlook on spiritual physic and religion, for example), not the change itself.