In practice medical practitioners, especially physicians and surgeons, have always had to learn some type of detachment or dispassion. To elucidate what was medical dispassion in seventeenth and eighteenth century England, how and why it was taught, to whom, and in what spaces, each chapter of this book examines a community of practitioners and explores different patterns of medical education, clinical practice, social institutions, and philosophical and religious ideas.

Contents: Introduction; Faithful eyes; Rational minds; Godly hearts; Disciplined hands; Necessary inhumanity; Conversant with the dead; Epilogue; Bibliography; Index.

Lynda Payne is Professor in the Department of History, University of Missouri - Kansas City, USA.