Cosmopolitanism and Heterodoxy: British and Swiss Itinerant Scholars and British Medical Reformations, 1580-1630

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a number of states enacted legislation to create or reform collegia medica and medical faculties in an attempt to contend with new trends in medical practices across the continent. Some of these moves were explicitly designed to counteract developments that established medical practitioners viewed as dangerously experimental and untested, such as chemical and Paracelsian ideas. Other trends presented opportunities for medical reform of best practices and innovative approaches to healthcare, which were introduced via institutional reform, such as the establishment of chairs of anatomy and botany and the creation of anatomy theatres within universities. Travelling academics and scholars were at the forefront of these activities. Their collective knowledge was shaped at regional centres where various national and confessional cultures could co-exist. The activities of those working at, and moving between, locations of heterodox knowledge reveal the extent to which scholars from non-conforming and ambiguous political backgrounds were the main drivers of reform and innovation in medical practice in this period. This article discusses the significance in this regard of British and Swiss medical reformers who worked and were educated at such locations.