Tim McHugh is a Wellcome Trust Researcher/Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Oxford Brookes University. His research has centred on the social history of medicine in France, examining the relationship between the nature of a hierarchical society and the charitable assistance of the poor in the early modern period. His research interests include the history of hospitals, the early modern nobility, rural France and the place of ‘alternative medicine’ in society throughout the ages.
This lecture seeks to contest Jean-Pierre Goubert’s picture of eighteenth-century Brittany as a medical desert by examining the roles played by parish priests in shaping the medical experience of the peasantry. The parish priest in Brittany was largely responsible for implementing much of the charitable action unlocked by the Catholic Reformation. One part of this was the ‘rescuing’ of the peasantry from medical ignorance. The paper also argues that parish priests deserve to be seen as amateur practitioners in their own right.
(Oxford Brookes University)
“Playing the Confinement Card: Financing of small hospitals in Brittany, 1662-1772”
McHugh, Tim. Hospital Politics in Seventeenth-Century France. Aldershot, 2007
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