The Influence of Medicine on Political Economy in the Seventeenth Century

The concurrent development of political economy and the modern conception of medicine was reflected from the first decades of the seventeenth century by a degree of interdisciplinary borrowing based on analogy between the human body and the body politic. It seemed perfectly feasible that the growing knowledge of the human body and its diseases might inspire new concepts, and vindicate the use of the scientific method. But while medicine provided new imagery for economic discourse, it would be hard to argue that it yielded new economic knowledge. However, some political economists seem to have become prisoners of metaphor, justifying their own practices by analogy with medicine.