ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

A Vade Mecum for Travel: Surgery and Itinerancy in Early Modern Britain

• In Event: European Surgeons Across the Early Modern World: Itineracy, Knowledge, and Practice

English Abstract

In the early 1660s, the surgeon Robert Mustow filled a worn notebook with surgical reading notes on surgery and physick, medical recipes, language glossaries from Malay, Hebrew and Persian to English, mathematical fancies and much more. In putting this notebook together, Mustow was participating in a long-standing medical practice -- creating his personal vade mecum, a handbook of know-how designed to aid his medical practice on the road, whether it was travel to the homes of patients within their own city, towns and villages or to far flung battlefields. Yet Mustow’s vade mecum differed from earlier examples in his focus on practical learning, particularly language learning. The rapid expansion of early modern travel and colonisation prompted a step-change in the itinerant patterns of British surgeons. If sixteenth-century surgeons tended to gain experience serving on the battlefields of the Thirty-Years War, figures like Mustow and his son Henry travelled to the East Indies and Africa on the ships of the East India Company or as part of the English occupation of Tangiers. These new patterns of itinerancy prompted substantive change in the kinds of knowledge, skills and expertise required of a surgeon. Centred on Mustow’s notebook and other surgical handbooks, this paper investigates the roles played by surgeons in early modern British colonial expansion and how these roles impacted upon surgical careers, knowledge and practice.

Author

• Elaine Leong, University College London