Stolberg's voluminous and engrossing book demonstrates the vital importance of everyday medical practice in early modern learned medicine. Until now, not much was known about the humdrum life of ordinary doctors in their practice and relationship with the medical community, patients, and their families. Stolberg gives us a comprehensive view of this scarcely investigated field by combing through thirty manuscript volumes of notes handwritten by a relatively obscure German physician, Georg Handsch (1529–78). Handsch studied medicine in Padua and Ferrara and became the court physician of the Austrian Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand II. Handsch wrote these notes for and to himself, never thinking of publishing them: this is why they contain information about his medical experience and that of other doctors, including unvarnished opinions about mistakes he and his colleagues made in diagnosing and treating illnesses or dealing with a patient. Stolberg found the volumes in the Austrian National Library of Vienna and states that Handsch's notes are unique in their abundance but are not the only references that helped him in his investigation: students’ notebooks, physicians’ notebooks and practice journals, and epistles that doctors exchanged outside of academia—available through a database of letters created under Stolberg's direction, written in German and Latin between 1500 and 1700—all contribute to the author's argument.
Thanks to this abundance of new manuscript material, Stolberg makes important discoveries that profoundly change the view of some long-held assumptions related to early modern medicine. His work confirms the pivotal importance of empirical knowledge and experimentation among the learned physicians of early modern Europe. Several discoveries, for instance, deal with the relationship between doctor and patient: early modern physicians did touch and inspect their patients’ bodies—some, with tools to diagnose and treat illnesses. Contrary to the medical literature that condemned it, uroscopy was a daily tool used by early modern physicians and insistently requested by patients. Other discoveries questioned the traditional model of humoral balance with which early modern physicians explained diseases in the human body. In daily life, all categories of people involved in medical practice, from the learned physicians to the empirici, described diseases as the consequence of rotting morbid matter that patients needed to evacuate as extraneous substances from their bodies to regain health.
The book is an absolute trove of new information and knowledge. However, due to space constrictions, I will proceed with a succinct summary of the content and then focus on the central claims that the author makes, underlining the validity and originality of these statements. The book is divided into three sections. The first gives an overview of the cursus studiorum that young men pursued to become physicians, the subjects they studied, and the cultural context in which they operated—physicians had to adopt the “habitus of the learned man” (82) at every stage of their career. The second section is devoted to medical practice, from physicians’ printed collections of consilia and curationes to the letters and oral diagnoses they shared with patients and their families, to the specific pathologies that affected patients, and the diagnosis, physical examination, and treatment of illnesses that doctors provided on a daily basis. The third section centers on the various figures of physicians—university professors, town and municipal physicians, and court physicians; their financial remuneration and social status; and the relationship between physicians and patients and their families. This section also describes the connections that learned doctors had with lay medical practitioners such as healers, empirics, barbers, and midwives.
Thanks to Stolberg's thoughtful and comprehensive analysis, the reader is presented with a permeable medical ecosystem, where learned physicians gained insights from empirici, barbers, and midwives; sought effective medications by advancing their knowledge of botany, pharmacology, and antidotes experimented on animals and humans; and conducted public and private postmortem anatomies with the hope of discovering a better way of treating the extraneous matter from which diseases originated. The universe Stolberg describes vividly confirms and emphasizes the importance of experimental knowledge in early modern medicine and science, foregrounding the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Far from our modern hyperspecialized life, it is a medical universe where trained doctors, untrained healers, and their patients share practical knowledge of how to heal bodies.
