The Poor and the Patient: Protestant Geneva in the Early Modern Period 1

ecent research has demonstrated the usefulness of considering both the history of lay and professional practices from the patient’s point of view. Issues explored include the interactions between the ill and contemporary healers 2, between medical knowledge and lay expectations 3, and between the ill person and his or her direct environment. 4 The results of these studies recognise the existence of a lay medical culture, although the importance of lay, informal healthcare and self-help remains difficult to assess throughout the Early Modern period. Moreover, the extant data are generally related to the more literate and prosperous spheres of society and little is known of what happens in less affluent environments. The poor – understood here not as vagrants who were generally driven away, but as recognised impoverished inhabitants of the city 5 R – have left few or no manuscripts. The aim of this contribution is to make use of the exceptionally rich sources kept in Geneva’s state and private collections in order to discuss available data on lay medical practices and reveal what general medical practices existed from the point of view of an ordinary or poor patient. It is important to stress from the out-set that medical practices are not reduced to acts performed by medical doctors alone, but understood to include self-help, informal counseling and any medical commodities or advice exchanged. The topic is as yet obscure and complicated by methodological issues pertaining to the difficulty of understanding the respective roles of different resources in a patient’s efforts to retrieve or to preserve their health in the past. The following pages, by avoiding modern definitions and assumptions on efficiency and concentrating on practices, aim to assess how the patient used available medical commodities and services. Particular attention is paid to different strategies condi