SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online

 
vol.ser2 issue11Lisbon’s House of Saint Lazarus in the early modern period author indexsubject indexarticles search
Home Pagealphabetic serial listing  

Services on Demand

Journal

Article

Indicators

Related links

  • Have no similar articlesSimilars in SciELO

Share


Cadernos do Arquivo Municipal

On-line version ISSN 2183-3176

Abstract

WALKER, Timothy. Some observations about medical practice and culture at Lisbon’s Todos-os-Santos Hospital during the Enlightenment Era. Cadernos do Arquivo Municipal [online]. 2019, vol.ser2, n.11, pp.11-26. ISSN 2183-3176.

This article describes and documents the important role and influence of the Todos-os-Santos Royal Hospital in producing trained, licensed physicians and surgeons for service in the Lusophone world. During the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, until to the 1755 earthquake, the Todos-os-Santos Royal Hospital in Lisbon (which offered formal instruction in practical medicine), along with the antiquated medieval curriculum of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Coimbra, were the only medical training centers structured in Portugal. This had serious implications for conventional medical treatment and practices. Even in Enlightenment era, in Portugal, training for state- -licensed healers was, at best, limited and inadequate. The Hospital was the main practical training facility for the medical arts during the late seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century, and was more open to innovations of surgical technique and applied medicines; it was there that the most innovative official medical teaching in Portugal occurred until the end of the reign of Dom João V. For example, the hospital boasted of a separate ward built and staffed especially for the mentally ill, and experimented with remedies for tropical diseases, often with indigenous medicines imported from the colonial empire.

Keywords : Physicians; Surgeons; Hospital; Illuminism period; Lisbon.

        · abstract in Portuguese     · text in English     · English ( pdf )

 

Creative Commons License All the contents of this journal, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License