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

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 -- 1. Public Practice: The European Longue Durée of Knowing for Health and Polity -- PART I: Scholar in Town, Scholar in Office -- 2. The Many Uses of Writing: A Humanist Physician in Sixteenth-Century Prague -- 3. Promoting a Good Physician: Letters of Application to German Civic Authorities, 1500-1700 -- 4. Deofficiis: Doctors' Oaths and Appointments in Early Modern Nuremberg -- PART II: Evaluating, Reporting -- 5. Reporting for Action: Forms of Writing between Medicine and Polity in Milan, 1580-1650 -- 6. Negotiating on Paper: Councilors, Medical Officers, and Patients in an Early Modern City -- PART III: Documenting, Locating -- 7. Accountability, Autobiography, and Belonging: The Working Journal of a Sixteenth-Century Diplomatic Physician between Venice and Damascus -- 8. A Sense of Place: Town Physicians and the Resources of Locality in Early Modern Medicine -- 9. Physical City: A Royal Physician's Warsaw -- 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 -- 11. Trading Information: The City of Nuremberg and the Birth of a Latin Medical Weekly -- Index.