Medicine and Religion in Enlightenment Europe is a valuable collection of papers from a conference held at Cambridge in 2004. The book contains thirteen chapters, plus an introduction by co-editor Andrew Cunningham that sets the volume in context and introduces the various chapters. While there is some inconsistency in the quality and scope of the essays, overall, this volume is an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly reconsideration of the complex relationship between reason, religion, and medical theory and practice during the eighteenth century. Those interested in detailed and fine-grained analyses of the medical theory and practice of the eighteenth century and its connection with Christian thought and practice will certainly want to examine this book carefully. Readers seeking either a comprehensive survey of medicine in the period, or a thorough examination of the relationship between medicine and religion in the Enlightenment, could probably do better with other more systematic treatments of the era.

Scholars long have appreciated the rather strained relationship between Christianity and medical practice in the Western world. Since the Gospels overflow with accounts of the miraculous healing power of God, nearly all efforts at human invention in matters of disease could easily be viewed as deriving their power from nefarious sources. Folk healers, naturally, were persistent targets of charges of witchcraft. Even within the more well-accepted academic tradition of medicine derived from the Greek tradition of Hippocrates, the stain of medicine as fundamentally a pagan system was difficult to shake—even after much Greek philosophical thought had been successfully integrated into Christianity through the efforts of St. Thomas Aquinas and others. As a result, the idea that physicians tended toward atheism was widespread throughout the Middle Ages. This tension between medicine and Christian orthodoxy became even more acute, however, once the secularizing intellectual trends of the seventeenth century took hold. This volume explores the complexity of the rather tense relationship between medicine and religion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and demonstrates both the complexity of this relationship and its wide regional variations during the era of the Enlightenment.

By far the most interesting and significant contribution in this volume is Jonathan I. Israel's essay on “Enlightenment, Radical Enlightenment, and the ‘Medical Revolution’ of the Late Seventeen and Eighteenth Centuries.” In this essay, Israel expands upon the work done in his important re-evaluation of radical Enlightenment philosophical traditions in his books on the Radical Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and the Enlightenment Contested (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). In this essay, Israel grounds his larger intellectual agenda in a series of specifically medical debates. He argues convincingly for the replacement of Peter Gay's “unitary Enlightenment” with a more comprehensive schema that includes a broad and dominant “moderate Enlightenment” emanating primarily from England and led by men like Locke and Newton. This moderate trend was countered on the one side by a strongly traditionalist and religiously founded Counter-Enlightenment and on the other side by a much more radical set of Enlightenment thinkers who were essentially materialists. These radicals tended to combine elements of Cartesianism with insights from Spinoza and his followers. With regard to medical theory and practice, Israel contends that “the two primary emancipating tendencies of the philosophical revolution engineered by Descartes and Hobbes became in some sense detached and reworked by the two rival Enlightenment wings into essentially opposed and irreconcilable styles of replacing the medical culture of the past” (6). Israel grounds this broad line of interpretation through a selected number of medical practitioners active in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and makes a convincing case that these three strains of thought all had a significant impact on the medical debates of the time.

The other essays in the book offer more limited perspectives on developments in medicine during the period. Whether through intention or happenstance, the book provides a glimpse into the regional character of Enlightenment thought and of medical practice in the period by including chapters that focus on Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Holland, Germany, Demark, England, and Scotland. While this does give the reader a view into the quite varied experiences of medical practice and religion around Europe during the era, it also creates a certain lack of cohesion among the various parts of the book. Since the Israel essay is so broad and synthetic, it might have strengthened the volume to ask the authors of the various regional essays to attempt to link their contributions to the broad arguments made in that opening chapter. As standalone pieces, some of the chapters work better than others, although this judgment might admittedly rest rather significantly on whether or not an individual chapter links up with one's own interests and regional specialization. In this way the book feels somewhat more like a special issue of an academic journal than a coherent collection of essays. This shortcoming is also reflected in the book's index, which is essentially just a listing of names and places with no real thematic entries to suggest overarching links among the essays. Many readers will end up consulting this book for only one or two of its essays, but nonetheless the volume does provide specialists in the history of medicine with a fascinating series of case studies.