Update: I have posted to SSRN a preprint of my new paper “Adam Smith and the ‘Absurd Prescriptions’ of Doctors“, which surveys Smith’s documented encounters with the doctors and medical treatments of his day.

Also, starting next week, I will begin blogging about another related aspect of the celebrated political economist’s contibutions to public health: Smith’s stinging contrarian critique of medical schools in his lengthy 1774 letter to Dr. William Cullen.