Medical Metaphors and Monetary Strategies in the Political Economy of Locke and Berkeley.

BERKELEY, George, 1685-1753; LOCKE, John, 1632-1704

The article shows how John Locke and George Berkeley's specific medical doctrines and practices helped determine the monetary strategies both thinkers proposed for their respective clients, the governments of England and Ireland. The intersection of medical and economic discourses can be traced to the beginning of the autonomy in the economic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Locke, besides being the consummate bureaucrat of a growing world empire, was a physician by training and wrote extensively on medical theory. He had a medical practice for a time, and the ingenious prosthetic device he implanted in his patient the Earl of Shaftesbury not only gave him entrée to the path of power, it also sealed his fame as a physician. Locke also, with the Earl of Shaftesbury's help, became secretary of the Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations in 1673 and began his first serious involvement with economic issues. George Berkeley frequently traversed the space between medicine and money. He was better known as the Irish bishop shaman of the tar-water cure for a wide variety of ailments than as the philosophical critic of matter. The medicophilosophical book he wrote in his last decade to justify his drug therapy, Siris, was, by far, the book of all his oeuvre most widely read by his contemporaries.