In his personal notebooks, the little known Bohemian physician Georg Handsch (1529--c. 1578) recorded, among other things, hundreds of vernacular phrases and expressions he and other physicians used in their oral interaction with patients and families. Based primarily on this extraordinary source, this paper traces the terms, concepts and images to which sixteenth-century physicians resorted when they explained the nature of a patient's disease and justified their treatment. At the bedside and in the consultation room, Handsch and his fellow physicians attributed most diseases to a local accumulation of impure, putrid or otherwise pathological humours. The latter were commonly said to result, in turn, from an insufficient concoction and assimilation of food and drink in the stomach and the liver or from an obstruction of the humoral flow inside the body and across its borders. By contrast, other notions and explanatory models, which had a prominent place in contemporary learned medical writing, hardly played a role at all in the physicians' oral communication. Specific disease terms were rarely used, a mere imbalance of the four natural humours in the body was almost never inculpated, and the patient's personal life-style and other non-naturals did not attract much attention either. These striking differences between the ways in which physicians explained the patients' diseases in their daily practice and the explanatory models we find in contemporary textbooks, are attributed, above all, to the physicians' precarious situation in the early modern medical marketplace. Since dissatisfied patients were quick to turn to another healer, physicians had to explain the disease and justify their treatment in a manner that was comprehensible to ordinary lay people and in line with their expectations and beliefs, which, at the time, revolved almost entirely around notions of impurity and evacuation.
...More
Article
Stolberg, Michael;
(2013)
Empiricism in Sixteenth-Century Medical Practice: The Notebooks of Georg Handsch
(/isis/citation/CBB001213587/)
Article
Hannah Murphy;
(2020)
Skin and Disease in Early Modern Medicine: Jan Jessen's De cute, et cutaneis affectibus (1601)
(/isis/citation/CBB992058159/)
Book
Elmer, Peter;
(2004)
The Healing Arts: Health, Disease and Society in Europe, 1500--1800
(/isis/citation/CBB000773358/)
Article
Dross, Fritz;
(2011)
Vom zuverlässigen Urteilen
(/isis/citation/CBB001420790/)
Book
Mortimer, Ian;
(2009)
The Dying and the Doctors: The Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England
(/isis/citation/CBB001230358/)
Chapter
Walter Grassi;
(2023)
La gotta: malattia dei re e regina delle malattie
(/isis/citation/CBB961934235/)
Book
Aberth, John;
(2011)
Plagues in World History
(/isis/citation/CBB001033389/)
Book
Solomon, Michael;
(2010)
Fictions of Well-Being: Sickly Readers and Vernacular Medical Writing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain
(/isis/citation/CBB001231071/)
Chapter
Domenico Roccolo;
(2023)
Confraternite e malati a Roma nell'età moderna
(/isis/citation/CBB551431790/)
Article
Mortimer, Ian;
(2005)
The Triumph of the Doctors: Medical Assistance to the Dying, c.1570--1720
(/isis/citation/CBB001030802/)
Book
Demaitre, Luke E.;
(2007)
Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body
(/isis/citation/CBB000773314/)
Article
Mello, Amílcar D'Avila de;
(2011)
John Banister: um cirurgião elisabetano no Brasil
(/isis/citation/CBB001420508/)
Thesis
Metzger, N;
(cited 2010)
Premodern Histories of Lycanthropy and Ephialtes
(/isis/citation/CBB001567253/)
Article
Miller, Kathleen;
(2011)
Illustrations from the Wellcome Library, William Winstanley's Pestilential Poesies in The Christians Refuge: Or Heavenly Antidotes against the Plague in this Time of Generall Contagion to Which Is Added the Charitable Physician (1665)
(/isis/citation/CBB001230158/)
Article
Stolberg, Michael;
(2013)
Medizinische Loci communes
(/isis/citation/CBB001420950/)
Book
Katritzky, M. A.;
(2012)
Healing, Performance and Ceremony in the Writings of Three Early Modern Physicians: Hippolytus Guarinonius and the Brothers Felix and Thomas Platter
(/isis/citation/CBB001213056/)
Article
Varlik, Nükhet;
(2013)
From “Bête Noire” to “le Mal de Constantinople”: Plagues, Medicine, and the Early Modern Ottoman State
(/isis/citation/CBB001201441/)
Article
Newton, Hannah;
(2011)
“Very Sore Nights and Days”: The Child's Experience of Illness in Early Modern England, c. 1580--1720
(/isis/citation/CBB001230154/)
Article
Bartolini, Donatella;
(2015)
On the Borders: Surgeons and their Activities in the Venetian State (1540--1640)
(/isis/citation/CBB001422194/)
Book
Stein, Claudia;
(2009)
Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany
(/isis/citation/CBB000933044/)
Be the first to comment!