(English) [Online source] Early modern scientific and medical travel
25 maart 2013
In 1663, Martin Lister left his parents’ house in Burwell, Lincolnshire to study medicine in Montpellier. Whilst in France for the next three years, he kept a journal in an almanac entitled Every Man’s Companion: Or, An useful Pocket-Book (MS Lister 19, Bodleian Library, Oxford). The pocket book demonstrates the intellectual development of a significant seventeenth-century physician and naturalist, and is a vivid, firsthand account of medical education and natural philosophy in the 1660s. It is also a detailed representation of the grand tour of a gentleman.
As the account of Lister’s journey is so detailed, his grand tour and memoirs have been recreated as an interactive website using maps, images, and texts, providing a virtual introduction to early modern medical education and natural history. The website, authored by Dr Anna Marie Roos, and funded by the British Academy, resides courtesy of ‘Cultures of Knowledge’ on the University of Oxford’s server: