Restoration London saw a wave of publications by physicians advocating that the ‘compleat physician’ should be one who experimented and produced his own medicines. Only thus, they argued, could the medical hierarchy be restored and medical authority re-established on a defensible basis. This article seeks to explain the context for this unusual approach, and why it failed to attract mainstream physicians by the end of the century, by considering the sixty-year career of one of its leading advocates, Everard Maynwaring (c.1629–1713), a prolific medical author, and what his own failure to enter the medical establishment may show about the problems inherent in this model for the physician. A university-trained gentleman physician who converted to chymical medicine c.1660, Maynwaring published learned and relatively unpolemical texts to persuade both medical and lay audiences of the superiority of experimental medicine as a mode of learned practice, yet could not easily reconcile this with the advocacy and sale of his own chymical medicines (especially as he focused increasingly on a small group of ‘universal medicines’) without being branded an ‘empirick’. Fragmentary evidence regarding his career suggests he became increasingly marginalised, and as an old man was reduced to advertising his cures like the ‘empiricks’ from whom he had sought to distance both himself and physicians in general.

The history of dentistry during the Third Reich is still a neglected chapter in medical history; especially with a view to the concentration camps. Beyond the theft of dental gold, we actually know very little about the number of camp dentists or even about their activities and how these changed in particular in the final phase of the war. By using as a case study the biography of Willi Schatz, 2nd SS dentist at Auschwitz from January 1944 till autumn 1944, this paper examines the tasks of SS camp dentists in Auschwitz. It points out to what extent the scope of action of the camp dentists changed under the impression of extraordinary events, and clarifies that using the example of the Ungarn Aktion, in which more than 300 000 deportees were immediately murdered. It illustrates that such situational dynamics were an essential driving force for the expansion of dentals tasks. Despite the fact that Schatz was acquitted during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial (1963–5) for lack of evidence, we show that dentists were not only part of the selection personnel but also high profiteers of the accelerated extermination actions. It can be demonstrated that participation in the selection process – originally reserved for physicians – offered SS dentists access to further SS networks. The study is based on primary sources supplemented with relevant secondary literature, and combines a biographical with a praxeological approach.