For too long, the central place of medicine and healing to both John Wesley and the Methodist movement has been ignored within scholarship. Wesley's medical text, Primitive Physic (1747), written and published for the labouring poor in eighteenth-century England, has frequently been dismissed as a populist work of ‘kitchen-physic’, lacking intellectual credibility, thus unworthy of serious academic attention. Significantly, despite the fact that he was an unqualified physician, some of the earliest articles investigating Wesley's medical activity featured mainly in history of medicine journals. These would eventually prove productive in generating greater interest across the board. Early articles include those written by B. G. Thomas, ‘John Wesley and the Art of Healing’, American Physician (1906); W. R. Riddell, ‘Wesley's System of Medicine’, New York Medical Journal (1914); George Dock, ‘The “Primitive Physick” of Rev. John Wesley: A Picture of Eighteenth-Century Medicine’, The Journal of the American Medical Association (1915); and...

You do not currently have access to this content.