The central argument of Peter Elmer's Medicine in an Age of Revolution is that medical practitioners in the seventeenth century were not, as many have supposed, politically neutral. In fact, physicians and other medical men were actively engaged in the lively politics of the interregnum and Restoration period, and their medical practice both facilitated and was influenced by their ideological convictions.

Over six chapters, Elmer goes about proving this thesis in exacting detail. The latter half of the seventeenth century was, he argues, an environment in which the body politic remained a dominant metaphor, despite previous assertions that Puritanism opposed such organicist concepts. It was also a time in which there were more medical practitioners and published medical texts than ever before, and not just, as has been frequently argued, because of an expanding marketplace, but because the growing “fiscal-military state” made medicine an appealingly lucrative and accessible profession. It is therefore fitting that medicine supplied both a battleground on which political ideas could be played out and an army of eager, educated young men prepared to fight for their cause. On one side were dissidents and non-conformists. They were often associated with the ill-fated Society of Chemical Physicians (though Elmer points out that Charles II was among the Society's supporters), and they frequently gained their medical degrees from continental universities such as Leiden, which also served as a place to lie low in times of political turbulence. On the other side were devotees of the High Church and Anglican traditions, clustering around Oxford and Cambridge and later dominating much of England (though in London, the College of Physicians moderated their influence).

As the caveats suggest, this is a nuanced picture, and Elmer is meticulous in describing the labyrinthine networks of friendship, patronage, employment, and rivalry which run through this world. Those connections extend above and below ground. Elmer notes that “One of the more notable aspects of the politicisation of the medical world in this period … was the extent to which healers of all kinds, including learned practitioners with medical degrees and other qualifications, became increasingly involved in the day-to-day political life of their communities and the wider nation” (175). There are innumerable instances here of favors and recommendations, sometimes surprising in nature; for instance, Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Humphrey Henchman, Bishop of London, frustrated the College of Physicians by exercising their power to provide licenses for iatrochemical physicians such as Robert Turner, the translator of various occult and Paracelsan texts. There are also shadier dealings. Elmer points out the obvious but hitherto largely unnoticed fact that the medical practitioner's ability to travel widely and at odd times, and to exchange letters in jargon incomprehensible to the layman, made him an ideal spy or insurrectionist. Numerous medical practitioners were implicated in the abortive Monmouth Rebellion of 1685; many more, it seems, were tangentially connected. By the 1680s, Elmer argues, the College of Physicians was a stronghold of Whiggism and dissent.

Where medical practitioners are shown as deeply imbricated with political concerns, the reverse relationship is harder to pin down. At times, the connection between the “new” iatrochemical forms of medicine and dissenting politics seems clear; however, Elmer urges caution. Ambivalence toward Galenic scholarship and a desire to embrace empirical medicine was not confined to one camp, and practitioners on both sides engaged in mudslinging about other practitioners whom they deemed either insufficiently learned or hide-bound by tradition. As Elmer points out, this is an area deserving of further study.

Medicine is a book populated by hundreds of characters from all over England and beyond. It builds up a detailed picture by going back and forth over the years from the Interregnum to the turn of the eighteenth century, and it is likely that those unfamiliar with the political events of this period may find themselves getting lost. Only the most dedicated student is likely to get to grips with it. In making a new connection between the political and medical worlds, it also maroons itself; this is not straightforwardly a work of medical, political, or cultural history. It is, however, an exemplar of archival research, which will be immensely valued by historians and literary scholars, not least as a who's who of the seventeenth-century medical landscape. There are detailed endnotes to each chapter (far more useful here than lost at the end of the book), as well as a compendious bibliography. Of particular value, however, will be the book's appendices: a biographical index of signatories in favor of the Society of Chemical Physicians in 1665 (medical and non-medical); a list of ejected ministers practicing medicine in London after 1660; sons of ejected ministers apprenticed to apothecaries in London after 1660; and medical mayors.