Medicine in Vienna in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 68 views

This dissertation examines the various aspects of medicine in Vienna, Austria during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The discrete groups of medical personnel who practiced in the city ranged from learned physicians at court, to city doctors, surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, and a variety of others. Each group had its own methods of employing and passing on the knowledge and skills that defined its professional existence. This dissertation explores how these different groups interacted, how they acquired their knowledge, and how they used it. The work demonstrates the ways in which both learned and unlearned medical practice and theory depended on the particular and often peculiar political, social, and religious relationships and forces at work in Vienna. The work emphasizes differences between a number of groups: between the physicians at court and those in the city; between the professors at the University of Vienna and the practitioners in the city; between the formal education of physicians and the apprenticeship learning of surgeons, apothecaries, and midwives; between Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish physicians. Exploration of questions of status, of the academic and scholarly interests of the physicians, as well as the various theoretical and practical responses to plague serve to fill out the picture of medical practice in early modern Vienna. Sources include the records of the medical faculty, financial records of the imperial court, wills and inventories of physicians, doctoral disputations, physician consultations, hospital records, mortuary records, correspondence, and acts of ennoblement. Extensive appendices include lists of physicians, midwives and surgeons in Vienna during this period; chronological lists of the magistri sanitatis (physicians of the municipal health bureaucracy); biographical information on the personal and court physicians (Hof- and Leibärzte); and a tabulation of the imperial pay records (Hofzahlamtsbücher) during this period.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy

Austria; medical practice theory; early modern medicine; plague; disease; historical analysis; physicians

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1994-05-01