Civic Medicine: Physician, Polity, and Pen in Early Modern Europe

Description

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. 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