The Influence of Medicine on Political Economy in the Seventeenth Century

Alain Clément

History of Economics Review, 2003, vol. 38, issue 1, 1-22

Abstract: The concurrent development of political economy and the modern conception of medicine was reflected from the first decades of the seventeenth century by a degree of interdisciplinary borrowing based on analogy between the human body and the body politic. It seemed perfectly feasible that the growing knowledge of the human body and its diseases might inspire new concepts, and vindicate the use of the scientific method. But while medicine provided new imagery for economic discourse, it would be hard to argue that it yielded new economic knowledge. However, some political economists seem to have become prisoners of metaphor, justifying their own practices by analogy with medicine.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/18386318.2003.11682093 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rherxx:v:38:y:2003:i:1:p:1-22

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rher20

DOI: 10.1080/18386318.2003.11682093

Access Statistics for this article

History of Economics Review is currently edited by John Harry Bloch and John Hawkins

More articles in History of Economics Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().