MEDICAL DISCOURSE IN RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY - THE CASE OF THE CRITIQUEOF ENTHUSIASM ON THE EVE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

Medicine is not only a cultural system of its own. It also performs sp ecific roles in the broader culture of society at large. This article examines the role of medical arguments in the critique of ''enthusiasm '' on the eve of the Enlightenment. The enthusiasts, who claimed to pr ophesy and to have direct divine inspiration, were increasingly seen i n the seventeenth century as melancholics. With the decline of humoral medicine, however, the account of melancholic disturbances - includin g enthusiasm - that was offered tended to be chemical, mechanistic, an d clearly corpuscular. Protestant ministers, in adopting such an accou nt of enthusiasm, also adopted a strict distinction between the realm of the mind (to which true prophecy belonged) and that of the body (in which they located the phenomena of enthusiasm). Such a distinction s erved in turn to demarcate more specifically the limits between the cl erical and medical professions. Yet in relegating the treatment of ent husiasts to the physicians, rather than seeing the enthusiasts as here tics, the ministers stood in danger of relying too much on a secular p rofession and secular arguments, thus paving the way to a more general secularization of the ideological basis of the social order.