"... investigates the influential individuals who attended England's most important patients during a pivotal epoch in the evolution of the state and the medical profession. Over three hundred men [and a handful of women], heretofore unexamined as a group, made up the medical staff of the Tudor and Stuart kings and queens of England [as well as the Lord Protectorships of Oliver and Richard Cromwell]. The royal doctors faced enormous challenges in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from diseases that respected no rank and threatened the very security of the realm. Moreover, they had to weather political and religious upheavals that led to regicide and revolution, as well as cope with sharp theoretical and jurisdictional divisions within English medicine. The rulers often interceded in medical controversies at the behest of their royal doctors, bringing sovereign authority to bear on the condition of medicine' (publisher).

"This book examines the effects of medical publishing on the momentous theoretical and jurisdictional controversies in health care in early modern England. The simultaneous collapse of medical orthodoxy and the control of medicine in London by the Royal College of Physicians occurred when reform-minded doctors who were trained on the continent, in tandem with surgeons and apothecaries, successfully challenged the professional monopoly held by Oxbridge-educated elites. This work investigates the book trade, the role it played in medicine, and the impact of the debate itself on the public sphere. Chapters analyze the politics and religious preferences of printers and sellers, gender as a factor in medical publishing, and the location of London bookshops, for clues to the business of well-being. Advertisements for remedies and therapeutic skills, the subject of another essay, became commonplace in 17th-century England; moreover, publishers and bookshop owners sometimes held the rights to proprietary medicines, undercutting licensed doctors. The final chapter surveys a variety of medical illustrations and their influence on the relationship between patient and physician. An epilogue considers the English medical scene and the world of print after the famous Rose decision of 1702, when the House of Lords gave apothecaries the legal right to practice medicine, ratifying the reality of a changed marketplace" (publisher).