Communities great and small across Europe for eight centuries have contracted with doctors. Physicians provided citizen care, helped govern, and often led in public life. Civic Medicine stakes out this timely subject by focusing on its golden age, when cities rivaled territorial states in local and global Europe and when civic doctors were central to the rise of shared, organized written information about the human and natural world. This opens the prospect of a long history of knowledge and action shaped more by community and responsibility than market or state, exchange or power.
Author(s): J. Andrew Mendelsohn, Annemarie Kinzelbach, Ruth Schilling
Series: The History of Medicine in Context
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: xvi+316
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures and Table
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Civic Medicine
Notes
1. Public Practice: The European Longue Durée of Knowing for Health and Polity
From Meaning and Culture to Knowledge and Polity
From Standing in Society to Acting on and for It
Values Across Spheres, Values in Practice
Why All This Matters
The Long and Early Modern?
Notes
PART I: Scholar in Town, Scholar in Office
2. The Many Uses of Writing: A Humanist Physician in Sixteenth- Century Prague
Georg Handsch
Poetry
Letters
Writing for the Printing Press
Personal Notes
Conclusion
Notes
3. Promoting a Good Physician: Letters of Application to German Civic Authorities, 1500–1700
Academic Training and Practical Knowledge
Social Relations
Administrative Practices and Obligations
Thinking Ahead
Beyond the City Walls
Times of Hardship
Conclusion
Notes
4. Deofficiis: Doctors’ Oaths and Appointments in Early Modern Nuremberg
Swearing the Physicians’ Oath
Contracting with the City
Becoming Incorporated
Conclusion
Notes
PART II: Evaluating, Reporting
5. Reporting for Action: Forms of Writing between Medicine and Polity in Milan, 1580–1650
Milan and Its Tribunale di Sanità
System of Information, Deliberation, and Action for Health
Polis by Papers?
Physicians in the Mix
Making Medicine Public
Notes
6. Negotiating on Paper: Councilors, Medical Officers, and Patients in an Early Modern City
Acting with Paper in Administrative Processes
Acting with Paper in Conflicts
Assessing in Town, on Paper, and in the World of Scholars
Certificates and Knowledge
Notes
PART III: Documenting, Locating
7. Accountability, Autobiography, and Belonging: The Working Journal of a Sixteenth-Century Diplomatic Physician between Venice and Damascus
Diario di condotta
Writing’s Reassurances
Paper Republic, I: Writing Acts
Paper Republic, II: Polis in Motion
Conclusion
Notes
8. A Sense of Place: Town Physicians and the Resources of Locality in Early Modern Medicine
The Town Physician as Case Collector
Historia epidemica and the Localization of Disease
The Place of “Place” in the Observationes
Epifanio Ferdinando of Mesagne: The Town Physician as Local Historian and Eulogist
APlace, aDisease: Taranto and Tarantism
Notes
9. Physical City: A Royal Physician’s Warsaw
The Book as an Object
Weather Prognosis and Imperial Panegyric
Investigating the City
Communicating in and about Warsaw
Garden City
ACulture of Place
Notes
PART IV: Translating, Translocating
10. Transformative Itineraries and Communities of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: The Case of Lazare Rivière’s The Practice of Physick
Lazare Rivière and the Praxis medica
London, Urban Politics, and the Printing of The Practice of Physick
Reading The Practice of Physick
Conclusions
Notes
11. Trading Information: The City of Nuremberg and the Birth of a Latin Medical Weekly
Commercium litterarium
Commercial Infrastructure in Nuremberg
Raw Material: Channeling the Flow of Information Toward Nuremberg
Production: Processing Letters in aScholarly Society
Distribution: Sending the Commercium litterarium into the World
The Saxon Expedition to Africa: an Example
Notes
Index
