Reconstructing the Medical Canon: Seventeenth-Century English Physicians and Their Notebooks

Based on two collections of personal notebooks I will investigate the role of translation in the re-creation and reconstruction of the medical canon in seventeenth-century England. One of the results of the so-called “scientific revolution” on the traditional medical corpus was that classical medicine was re-framed and interspersed with vernacular, practical, and local knowledge. The medical practitioner John Ward (1629-1681), an Oxford man, left seventeen volumes of ‘diaries’ in which he recorded what he read, with whom he spoke or corresponded, and in which he noted down medical practices and recipes. A contemporary of his, the physician Daniel Foote (1629-1700), had trained in Cambridge. Foote left more than thirty-five volumes of notebooks, giving an insight into his university education and his many different interests and occupations. The Ward volumes, which have been described before, will form the context in which Daniel Foote’s collection will be analysed. Foote’s notebooks contain many extractions from canonical texts both in Latin and translated into English, but they also contain translations, from Latin, German, Dutch, and French lesser-known texts into English. Apart from textual translations the volumes also contain books of tables, summarizing and visualizing classical and vernacular medical information into manageable portions. By comparing the note-taking practices of these two medical practitioners, this talk will make clear how translation of texts and practices from a variety of sources was essential in building a new medical canon.