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The branch of medicine concerned with pregnancy, childbirth and the period around delivery. It connects maternal physiology, fetal development and the mechanics and complications of birth.

The branch of medicine concerned with cancer, including its biology, diagnosis and treatment. Studying initiation, progression and response to therapy connects cellular mechanisms with clinical outcomes.

The branch of medicine concerned with the eye and visual function. Optical measurements, tissue examination and neural assessment address different sources of impaired vision.

The dried latex of the opium poppy, containing several alkaloids. Crude preparations must not be treated as interchangeable with a standardized opioid medicine.

The branch of medicine concerned with disorders of the ear, nose, throat and related head-and-neck structures. Its problems connect sensory function, breathing, swallowing and communication with local anatomy.

The seventeenth-century transformation extended well beyond astronomy and mathematical physics, but it was neither simultaneous nor uniform across every field. An answer limited to new planetary arrangements and laws of motion would miss changes in the study of living bodies, small structures, materials and the organization of inquiry. Calling these changes a Scientific Revolution should introduce a problem of explanation rather than decide in advance that they formed one event.

William Harvey's On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals by William Harvey provides a clear counterexample to a narrow account. His argument for blood circulation combined observation of cardiac action, the direction of flow indicated by valves, and interventions using ligatures. It also employed a quantitative constraint: if the amount propelled at each beat is multiplied by the number of beats, the throughput soon exceeds the amount that could plausibly be freshly produced and consumed as nourishment. In modern symbols, throughput is $V_{\mathrm{through}}=qN$. This is an argument about a repeatedly circulating stock, not a requirement that all that volume be present at once. The book's chapter IX explicitly develops the comparison.^[ref]

The intervention was not simply an application of a completed mechanical worldview to physiology. It drew on medical and anatomical problems and retained explanatory commitments which do not coincide with later accounts of the body. A historian can recognize the force of the circulation argument without making its author an advocate of every subsequent development in medicine. Nor did a circulation argument by itself supply microscopic observation of the entire connecting pathway.

Microscopy offers a second case. Robert Hooke's Micrographia by Robert Hooke made minute structures available to a new audience through selected observations and elaborate images. His examination of cork described the small compartments for which he used the word cells; this was not yet a general modern cell theory. The work ranged across biological specimens and manufactured objects, including the point of a needle. Its preface made the improvement of the senses through scientific instruments a programme of inquiry. Preparation, illumination and representation were consequently part of making an observation, rather than optional matters outside it.^[ref]

The investigation of air supplied another transformation. Robert Boyle's pneumatic programme varied the conditions surrounding a specimen by using an air pump. A claim about pressure, burning or sound could be pursued by operating an apparatus and reporting what happened as air was removed or admitted. This joined work on materials to questions about experimental evidence and the acceptability of explanations. It does not follow that every old chemical practice disappeared or that experimental facts selected one complete account of matter without further reasoning.^[ref]

These cases also direct attention to institutions and labour. The Royal Society and the printing of experimental reports created ways of advertising findings, soliciting responses and establishing reputations. Skilled construction, preparation and repair supported claims associated in print with learned authors. A new society did not automatically make everyone a witness on equal terms, and access to a costly scientific instrument was not universal access to its results.

The breadth of change therefore strengthens the case for studying more than a sequence of theories. It does not justify treating every innovation from 1600 to 1700 as one inevitable step toward the present. Different investigations retained different parts of inherited natural philosophy; some techniques were older than their new settings, and changes in public credibility differed from changes in explanation. The useful conclusion is a plural one: significant transformations in physiology, microscopy, experimental work on matter, and knowledge-making institutions accompanied developments in astronomy and mechanics. Their connections have to be demonstrated through particular practices, not inferred solely from sharing a century.

Translation. For rapidly developing, or acute diseases, also resolve of their own accord, sometimes through favourable chance and sometimes through nature's favour. Consequently, ignorant people, carried away by this, often avoid physicians and attribute these favourable outcomes to new incantations and amulets, or to chance; for these rapidly developing diseases are driven out either by a flow of sweat, by blood discharged through the nose, or by a discharge from the intestines. But chronic diseases, or diseases of slow development, which have already gained possession of the body with a kind of prior claim, call for the skill of the physician alone, since they are resolved neither by nature nor by chance.

Interpretation. Caelius Aurelianus contrasts spontaneous resolution in acute disease with the entrenched course of chronic disease. Here passiones means affections or diseases, not emotions; ligamenta means protective bindings or amulets, not anatomical ligaments; proventus means favourable outcomes. The metaphor praejudicio quodam gives the established disease something like a prior claim on the body. The final assertion is the author's defence of professional medicine, not a present-day law that every chronic disease requires effective medical treatment or that none can remit spontaneously. The account of sweating, nosebleeds and intestine discharge describes his historical explanation, not evidence that deliberately producing these discharges cures acute disease. ^[ref]

Original volume: Examination papers for the Degree of Bachelor of Medicine by the University of Oxford (1864–1867). Original scanned volume, PDF page 99. Oxford, December 1867.

Original questions are transcribed from the public-domain edition. Credit: Wellcome Collection; original supplied by Royal College of Physicians, London. Source and public-domain rights statement.

The answers distinguish the terminology and therapeutic possibilities of 1867 from present medicine. They explain general anatomy, physiology and clinical reasoning; no individual patient or examination findings are assumed.

Pharmacy concerns the preparation, quality and supply of medicines. Formulation connects chemical identity to a usable pharmaceutical preparation; two products containing the same named drug need not have identical concentration or delivery properties.

A medicine producing bowel evacuation, historically often implying a more vigorous effect than a mild laxative.

Reduction of renal function, which may affect the elimination and toxicity of medicines without amounting to complete kidney failure.

Reduction of the drive or effectiveness of breathing, which can impair carbon dioxide elimination and oxygenation. It is a physiological effect with several causes, including some medicines and nervous-system disorders.

The branch of medicine concerned with breathing, gas exchange and respiratory disease. Airflow, lung expansion, diffusion and blood flow can each limit respiratory performance through different mechanisms.

The branch of medicine concerned with inflammatory, autoimmune and other disorders of joints and connective tissues. Similar patterns of pain can arise through different mechanisms, making anatomical distribution and systemic findings important.

The course catalogue below covers undergraduate degrees, integrated master's degrees, taught master's programmes and research master's programmes in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, engineering and medicine. Course names and examination stages follow the University's published directories and departmental teaching information.^[ref] Graduate programmes and historical examination holdings are distinguished from one another: a current course listing does not establish which past papers are held.

The branch of medicine concerned with the urinary tract and the male reproductive system. Obstruction, infection, stone formation and tissue disease provide different mechanisms for apparently similar urinary symptoms.