Book Review

Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in seventeenth-century London

N Engl J Med 1995; 333:261-262July 27, 1995

Article

Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in seventeenth-century London
By Harold J. Cook. 301 pp. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. $45. ISBN: 0-8018-4778-8

Harold Cook is well known as a historian for his work on 17th-century English medicine. His work covers the beginning of the long-drawn-out change from the medicine of antiquity to the new medicine that was supported by the philosophies of the scientific revolution. The Anglican medical establishment of the time, chartered as the College of Physicians, was often nervous about these innovations. The college acted through its censors to police the practice of medicine in London, watching out for quackery, advertising, and infringements of its royal monopoly. The college did not stand for all physicians, however. There were many outsiders: foreigners, advocates of the new chemical medicine, and those ungentlemanly persons who were unconcerned about keeping the practice of physicians separate from surgery or the compounding of drugs.

In his other publications, Cook has used the college's papers to trace several of the cases brought by the censors against physicians who offended it, and used the cases as exemplars to throw light on the London medical scene. His interest in the life of the Dutch immigrant doctor Joannes Groenevelt began with one of those cases. Groenevelt was accused of malpractice, sent to Newgate Gaol, and, because the college kept up its harassment, eventually ruined. As he had done before, Harold Cook makes use of the documents bearing on the case to put together a context for the practice of medicine in 17th-century London. In this particular case he has pushed further; Groenevelt was educated and medically trained in Holland, and his case can be used to illuminate more than just the London scene. His life involves medicine in Holland and in London, as well as the political events that linked England and Holland in the 17th century.

The main sources for this detailed study are Groenevelt's publications — rather too many for him to have really been an “ordinary doctor” — the letters exchanged between Groenevelt and his friend Casparus Sibelius, held in the British Library, and the above-mentioned papers of the College of Physicians. Information about Groenevelt in Holland is rather sparse, consisting mainly of his name in various university registers. These indications of his presence allow the historian to round out the story with materials that tell us what else was going on at the Dutch universities: who was teaching, what was being discussed and published, and how it all compared with what was happening in London. We know that Groenevelt was there, but we are left with a kind of negative image of him, a blank space in the middle of the detail.

Cook has spared no pains to try to rediscover 17th-century medical life from the documentary hints it has left behind. He has searched the archives in Oxford, London, Amsterdam, Deventer, Grave, Zutphen, and Leiden, and has learned Dutch. His evocation of time and place is becoming richer with every publication. This is a book that recreates the complicated relations of the period in compelling detail.

Pauline M.H. Mazumdar, M.D.
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1K7