Quackery or cure? Adam Smith on the *absurd prescriptions* of doctors (continued)

(Continued from yesterday’s post) Adam Smith’s next direct experience with doctors would occur in October 1766 in Paris. Duke Henry’s younger brother, Hew Campbell Scott (pictured below), contracted some kind of illness in the City of Light. Although Hew would obtain the best medical care he could have possibly received in 18th-century Paris, the intellectual and cultural epicenter of the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, his sickness so severe that it would take his life in a matter of days. For his part, Adam Smith–who, after all, was responsible for the health and safety of his teenage pupils as their travelling tutor–had once again consulted the best doctors he could find, including his friend the royal physician François Quesnay as well as Richard Gem (1717–c.1800), the doctor assigned to the British embassy in Paris (Armbruster 2019, p. 131), and Théodore Tronchin (1709–1781), the famed physician, Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the Academy of Geneva, who had opened a medical…