Medicine in the Life of Religious Orders during the 17th Century: Example of the Society of Jesus

1 Summary The thesis deals with relation of the medicine and the religious ambient in the 17th century. The original purpose of this study was to describe medical features of everyday life in colleges of the Jesuit order. However during the research I came across several questions that I had to answer in context of the Czech history of medicine, and that is why this text has three main foci. Firstly I have collected and described those features of recent development of foreign medical history, which I consider to be important for my purpose, and which have not been reflected in the medical history so far. Among others socio-constructivist and anthropological approaches to terms like "illness", "health", "healing", "academic medicine" etc. are discussed. With respect to the second part I had also to deal with the issue of retrospective diagnoses and particularly with history of the plague. Secondly, regarding the fact that healing in a Jesuit community was always associated with a strong religious aspects, I had to analyse a problem of miraculous cures and their social and cultural context. Medical history has always been an interdisciplinary field but in this case I had to rely on methods based on humanities rather than on sciences. As a starting point I have used a list of more that 1000 miracles ascribed..