Medicine and Religion at the Early Modern Deathbed: How Can We Reframe the Narrative?

Abstract

Since the 1960s, at a time when medicine was transforming Western conceptions of, and approaches to, the end of life, historians, historians of medicine, and specialists of religious studies have delved into death from a historical perspective. In the wake of historiens de la mentalité like Philippe Ariès and Michel Vovelle, studies commonly emphasise the limited autonomy of medicine vis-à-vis religion in conceptualising death and care for the dying. Only in the late eighteenth century, with Enlightenment culture and the secularization of society, were physicians supposedly encouraged to adopt a more active stance on the end of life. The aim of this paper is to survey recent scholarship that revisits the interaction of medicine and religion at the deathbed. In doing so, it presents an alternative to the rather dichotomous interpretation of the rise of medicine going hand in hand with the downfall of religion. It points to problems and sources that might be reconsidered in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the interaction and reciprocal developments of medicine and religion in early modern Europe.