Medicine and Economics in Early Modern Thought

Related Topics

Galenism, Political economy, Medical education

Introduction

The early modern period saw the births of many scientific disciplines that continue to exert their influence on matters of nature and society up to the present day. One of modernity’s most important social scientific endeavors, that of economics, was among the branches of science that began to take shape in the seventeenth century. Although Adam Smith is often credited as the founding father of “political economy,” the discipline’s roots date back at least 150 years from Smith’s highly influential treatises on the subject that were published in the second half of the eighteenth century. A great many early pioneers of systematic thinking about economic matters both in England and on the continent shared a background of being educated in medicine, and the two fields (that of the health and sustenance of the human body on the one hand and the integrity and maintenance of social institutions on the other) happily...