Conclusion: Disciplines, professions, and the public sphere

Summary

The emergence of the professoriate as a full-time career during the early years of the nineteenth century marked a signal change in the social organization of German intellectual life, which would have enormous consequences over the long term. In the first place, it would lead to the recruitment of students directly into the professorial ranks, creating in medical faculties a cadre of “physicians” whose attachment to the practice of medicine was uncertain. By mid-century, medical students like Carl Gegenbaur, Ernst Haeckel and Emil Du Bois-Reymond could take an M.D. without seriously intending to make a career as practitioners. Such career goals would have been virtually inconceivable in 1750, and were remarkable even in 1800. Secondly, these new professors would begin trading older forms of academic scholarship for the production of research more akin to our sense of the word: empirical discoveries meant to enrich the store of knowledge. While such research would eventually find its way into medical curricula, it was not conducted necessarily with pedagogical aims in mind, and much of what had once counted as scholarship in the eighteenth century (such as writing textbooks) no longer carried the same prestige. Of course, this is not to imply that empirical research had been unknown to eighteenth-century scholars, only to explain that the weight of research effort had shifted and that the environment for it – both institutional and cultural – had changed considerably.