Mandeville on Medical Men

This chapter reflects upon the usefulness of Mandeville’s medical writings, and especially his criticisms of the medical fraternity, for contemporary thinking in medical ethics. I examine Mandeville’s complaint that the faddish application of mathematics to therapeutics leads physicians away from attendance to the sick, and that their natural desire to maximize their fees concentrates their social function into the act of prescribing—leaving them open to the influence of apothecaries as the source of their observations. I contend that Mandeville’s reflexions on the tendency of capital to concentrate the social function of medicine into prescription, and to leave medical practitioners at the mercy of drug manufacturers are prescient pieces of social analysis.