Age, Status, and Reading in the Eighteenth Century

Writing Doctors and Writing Health in the Long Eighteenth Century

“…gentlemen', she explains, 'set off on a different road entirely, embarking on a specialized education that was all about distancing them from the shared vernacular world'. 3 It was from these populations of young men that universities gained their students, including those who would go on to qualify and practise as physicians. The ability to read classical languages was particularly important within university education because, as Thomas Neville Bonner summarizes, '[f]or the traditional physician of the eighteenth century, medicine was above all a humane study, mastered largely through books and the careful examination of medicine's past'.…”