Overview

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.

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9781472453587

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Civic Medicine offers a striking and pathbreaking perspective on medical knowledge in early modern Europe. Transcending influential approaches in which physicians and patients are viewed as caught up in the networks of the medical marketplace or else of modernising territorial states, Mendelsohn and his team focus instead on the role and activities of physicians in civic office across the continent. This provides a stimulating, holistic vision of the early modern physician and his world, now grounded in an enriched sense of community rather than the market or the state. - Colin Jones, co-author of The Medical World of Early Modern France At last we are beginning to understand early modern physicians as full-fledged members of their urban polities, holding offices, taking oaths, and entering into the world of the experts who knew how to employ paper technologies. According to the authors of this volume, even the attentiveness of physicians to careful written descriptions of medical cases arose more from civic humanism than from medicalization, medical police, professionalization, the new science, or even commerce. In revisiting the history of city physicians, these studies offer new insights into medicine's civic past. - Harold J. Cook, author of Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age

Author Information

J. Andrew Mendelsohn is Reader in History of Science and Medicine in the School of History at Queen Mary, University of London, having previously taught at Imperial College London. Annemarie Kinzelbach has published extensively on medicine, health, and society in early modern Germany. Ruth Schilling trained in early modern urban history and is Junior Professor for the History of Science at the University of Bremen and scientific coordinator of exhibitions and research at the German Maritime Museum.

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