How did medicine fare in an age of revolution? The aim of the editors in calling for contributions to this volume was to show that medicine in the century approximately from 1630 to 1730 did not exist as an activity unrelated to others, whether intellectual or social. But more than this, the aim was to go beyond putting medicine into a ‘context’ of political, religious and social change, and explore the dynamics that changed the nature of medicine, given the major movements of the time in these other activities and in medicine's substrate, natural philosophy. It was not, after all, until the seventeenth century that the revived classicism of the medical renaissance of the previous century was successfully overturned.

The question of how medicine fared in an age of revolution becomes necessary because it has been given less attention by historians than it deserves. This is partly because the giant figure of Newton has previously focused attention on natural philosophy, so that, for instance, discussions of William Harvey have often been related to the ‘scientific revolution’ rather than to the medicine of the time. Over the last half century too, historiographical trends have tended to express the relationship of medicine, religion and politics in terms of the persuasive puritan-and-science thesis. Both of these approaches too readily identify medicine with ‘science’ and ignore medicine's specific characteristics and development.