E Empirics in Early Modern Medicine R. Allen Shotwell Department of Liberal Arts, Ivy Tech Community College, Terre Haute, IN, USA Related Topics Medicine · Surgery · Medical marketplace Synonyms Charlatans; Quacks Introduction The early modern concept of medical empirics was rooted in the classic account of medical sects described by Galen in the second century C.E. and widely circulated in medieval and early modern Europe. Among the competing sects were the Empiricists who eschewed all theory in favor of treatment based on direct, personal experiences with patients and who stood in sharp contrast to a more rationalist approach to medicine favored by Galen (Temkin 1935). In the early modern period, empiric had become a label generally applied to healers of any sort who did not have formal, medical training or who offered cures that were not based on a rationalized assessment of the patient and their condition, unlike learned physi- cians. Defined in this way, an empiric could be one or more of a number of different healers in different timeframes and locations, but one of the most common examples was someone who sold medications, purported to work for everyone, and be available without any assessment of an individual patient’ s condition. Empiric, like a variety of other terms applied to healers who employed cures not sanctioned by learned medicine like quack or charlatan, was most often a pejorative. Learned physicians typically condemned empirics on the grounds that they lacked formal liberal arts and medical training or rational approaches to their cures even though physicians sometimes employed similar cures and adopted knowledge derived from experience themselves. The Medical Marketplace and the Villainizing of Empirics By the late sixteenth century, sellers of medica- tions who often hawked their wares in piazzas and public squares employing theatrical methods like music and banners and who operated outside an already well-established system of learned physicians and apothecaries were active in vari- ous cities in Italy. These sellers were often tran- sient, moving from city to city or to the city from the countryside, and they were known by a variety of names, including charlatans, more rooted in © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 D. Jalobeanu, C. T. Wolfe (eds.), Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_280-1