1. The profession's acceptance was vital. It would not be until the new ideas and discoveries had been firmly embraced by the medical community that their circulation would begin to extend beyond the scientific élite and interested amateurs, and that they would start to become part of the general cultural consciousness. How quickly and in what manner this occurred is of course an entirely different question and one perhaps that will never be satisfactorily answered. The history of popular culture in the early modern period is attracting increasing interest, but historians' conclusions to date are open to question. It is easy enough to discover how quickly new scientific, political and religious ideas became accessible to the mass of the population by studying the content of popular literature—chapbooks, ballads, and so on—that poured incessantly from the press from the start of the seventeenth century. It is more difficult, however, to come to satisfactory conclusions about the social conditions of the readers, for the historian can only rely on the information from wills and inventories. It need hardly be said that such sources tend to be socially biassed. As yet no one has devoted a specific study to the medical content of popular literature, but a number of works by French historians touch on the popularisation of scientific ideas in general. Compare
Martin H.J. Livres, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle (1598–1701) Geneva 1969 2 61 98 220–254, 858–884; R. Mandrou, De la culture populaire aux 17e et 18e siècles (1964, Paris) (a study of popular literature printed at Troyes); and G. Bollème, ‘Litérature populaire et litérature de colportage au 18e siècle’, in F. Furet (ed.), Livre et société dans la France du XVIIIe siècle (1964, Paris), 61–92 (a general survey).