Introduction - Peter Elmer 1 Medicine in western Europe in 1500 - Sachiko Kusukawa 2 The sick and their healers - Silvia De Renzi 3 The medical renaissance of the sixteenth century: Vesalius, medical humanism and bloodletting - Sachiko Kusukawa 4 Medicine and religion in sixteenth-century Europe - Ole Peter Grell 5 Chemical medicine and the challenge to Galenism: the legacy of Paracelsus, 1560-1700 - Peter Elmer 6 Policies of health: diseases, poverty and hospitals - Silvia De Renzi 7 Old and new models of the body - Silvia De Renzi 8 Women and medicine - Silvia De Renzi 9 The care and cure of mental illness - Peter Elmer 10 War, medicine and the military revolution - Ole Peter Grell 11 Environment, health and population - Mark Jenner 12 Medicine and health in the age of European colonialism - Andrew Wear 13 Organization, training and the medical marketplace in the eighteenth century - Laurence William Brockliss ;