Almost anyone can give health care advice

We’ll cover more about medical personnel in 18^th century England later, but it was quite common for someone educated and intelligent to diagnose and treat others.  They didn’t even have to be medically qualified.  Not only John Wesley, but Samuel Johnson, who wrote “A Dictionary of the English Language” and was a great literary critic, was proud of his medical knowledge.[1]

Did you know that part of the training for a Church of England clergy in the 1700s was in medical care?  The Church even gave out licenses to practice, especially in small towns and rural villages where people usually had no other source for medical advice.[2]

 

The man on the right is Samuel Johnson -- notice he is wearing a wig, while John Wesley (below) is not. Johnson had such poor eyesight that he often singed his wigs because he held the candle too close to his eyes.[3] One reason Wesley probably did not wear a wig was because he didn’t need to shave his head to prevent lice attaching to the roots, since he was very fastidious and clean

Sorry – off on a tangent.  Therefore, as clergy and an intellectual, Wesley felt perfectly within his rights to write a health care book and to recommend treatments.

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[1] Picard, xvii.

[2] Madden, Deborah. “Wesley as an Advisor on Health and Healing” in Maddox, Randy and Jason Vickers, The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley(New York: Cambridge University, 2010), 181.

[3] Picard, 226.

Images: Wellcome Library, London.