IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB761893164

A New Concept for Surgery in European Hospitals? Records of Practice in Germany, Italy, and Spain During the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (2023)

Kinzelbach, Annemarie (Author)
Florian Wieser (Author)

NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, Technik und Medizin
Volume: 31
Issue: 1
Pages: 27-49

DOI: 10.1007/s00048-022-00355-6

Outside Links

PubMed

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

The recent discovery of a manuscript has allowed historians to understand the medical routine in a hospital known as the Schneidhaus in Augsburg between the sixteenth and nineteenth century. The context of the manuscript shows that at this institution, non-academic specialists, generally members of the guild of barber-surgeons and barbers, routinely performed surgical cures of intestinal hernia, scrotal swellings, and vesical calculus. The Schneidhaus exclusively admitted patients applying for such specialised treatments and offered no other services. Such a degree of specialisation within medical establishments seems to have only existed in the Holy Roman Empire at this institution founded by the Fugger family in Augsburg. We propose that the Schneidhaus was either itself a model hospital or adopted a model from another site in Europe. In this paper, we investigate the connections of the Schneidhaus to the practice of surgeons in both Italy and Spain. In Italy, a momentous new technique for identifying and removing vesical calculi was first published in 1522. Although surgical treatment was established in Italian hospitals, they tended not to specialise in such surgical treatment exclusively. Moreover, at the time of the hospital’s foundation, the Fugger shifted their economic and social focus from Venice to the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain, research in the history of medicine is complicated by outdated notions about specialised surgery, not unlike those that were recently still current regarding the Holy Roman Empire. We attempt to disprove these notions and use the exemplary textbook of one academic physician, Francisco Díaz, to approach specialized surgical practice in sixteenth-century Spain. In his work, Díaz describes the new Italian surgical method in detail and recognizes the importance of craftsman surgeons to both its development and application. However, he also argues for an expanded role for academic physicians as supervisors of craftsman surgeons’ work. All this is suggestive of a greater network of surgical professionals within which both the methods of the craft and its organisational structures were transported. As such, the Schneidhaus can be seen as a node that embodied the institutionalization of surgical practice as a European phenomenon. Further research is necessary, and we propose how this might be carried out to reveal these historical phenomena in their full complexity.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB761893164/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Book Friedrich, Christoph; Bernschneider-Reif, Sabine; (2003)
Rosarium litterarum: Beiträge zur Pharmazie- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift für Peter Dilg zum 65. Geburtstag (/isis/citation/CBB000780042/)

Article Stoichita, Victor I.; (2012)
“La seconde peau”. Quelques considérations sur le symbolisme des armures au XVIe siècle (/isis/citation/CBB001420822/)

Thesis Heidi Hausse; (2016)
Life and Limb: Technology, Surgery, and Bodily Loss in Early Modern Germany, 1500-1700 (/isis/citation/CBB244378239/)

Article Daniel Schäfer; Karl August Neuhausen; (2014)
Schiller und die Medizingeschichte (/isis/citation/CBB606824395/)

Article Savoia, Paolo; (2016)
Le tecniche d’innesto e la rivoluzione scientifica: chirurghi, naturalisti, giardinieri e agronomi. (/isis/citation/CBB040873571/)

Article Patrizia Fughelli; (2017)
Cesare Magati. Spanning over centuries (/isis/citation/CBB235182785/)

Article Paolo Savoia; (2019)
Skills, Knowledge, and Status: The Career of an Early Modern Italian Surgeon (/isis/citation/CBB083078054/)

Book Nelli-Elena Vanzan Marchini; (1993)
Dalla scienza medica alla pratica dei corpi: Fonti e manoscritti marciani per la storia della sanita (/isis/citation/CBB987889704/)

Article Paola Salvi; (2020)
Da Leonardo da Vinci a Bernardino Genga. I trattati per i “curatori delle ferite” e gli “statuari e pittori” (/isis/citation/CBB172664092/)

Book Fournier-Antonini, Guenièvre; (2012)
Barcelone, Gênes et Marseille: Cartographies et images, XVIe-XIXe siècle (/isis/citation/CBB001201662/)

Book Guzzetti, Luca; (2000)
Science and Power: The Historical Foundations of Research Policies in Europe (/isis/citation/CBB000102114/)

Thesis Danielle Abdon Guimaraes; (2020)
Poverty, Disease, and Port Cities: Global Exchanges in Hospital Architecture During the Age of Exploration (/isis/citation/CBB258526721/)

Article Eamon, William; (2005)
The Charlatan's Trial: An Italian Surgeon in the Court of King Philip II, 1576--1577 (/isis/citation/CBB001023379/)

Article Montero Cartelle, Enrique; (2012)
Benito Arias Montano y Francisco Arceo: la redacción del De recta curandorum vulnerum ratione (/isis/citation/CBB001450442/)

Article Fresquet Febrer, José Luis; (2002)
La práctica médica en los textos quirúrgicos españoles en el siglo XVI (/isis/citation/CBB000350182/)

Book Rohmann, Gregor; (2013)
Tanzwut: Kosmos, Kirche und Mensch in der Bedeutungsgeschichte eines mittelalterlichen Krankheitskonzepts (/isis/citation/CBB001201430/)

Article Giancarlo Zanier; (2004)
La presenza di Patrizi nella filosofia naturale di Daniel Sennert (/isis/citation/CBB013691400/)

Article Fabrizio Bigotti; (2023)
Commenting on Aristotle with a Knife (/isis/citation/CBB858595767/)

Article Gabriele Marasco; (2011)
Gerolamo Cardano: tradition classique et réalités nouvelles dans l'anatomie et dans la chirurgie à l'epoque de la Renaissance (/isis/citation/CBB432415041/)

Book Michael Stolberg; (2022)
Gabrielle Falloppia, 1522/23-1562: The Life and Work of a Renaissance Anatomist (/isis/citation/CBB668925492/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}