UC Berkeley

In 1571 the Nuremberg physician, Joachim Camerarius (1534-1598), submitted for the appraisal of his city's Senate, a substantial manuscript titled "Short and Ordered Considerations for the Formation of a Well-Ordered Regime." As one of these 'considerations', he petitioned the Council to establish a Collegium medicum: an institutional body that would operate under the council's mandate to regulate and reform the practice of medicine in the Imperial City of Nuremberg. Although never published, this text became the manifesto of an ongoing movement for the reform and reorganization of medicine throughout the sixteenth century. This 'medical reformation' was a professional claim to social status and political authority on the part of academically educated municipal physicians. More elusively and more importantly, the medical reformation was also the consequence of a series of epistemological shifts within medical knowledge, as practiced and conceived by German municipal physicians in the sixteenth century. In a series of chapters on publications, personal libraries, and correspondence networks respectively, this dissertation examines the way in which the Nuremberg physicians re-created their practice of medicine, privileging their medical 'methodologies,' tactile processes, observation, consensus between physicians and new pharmaceutical distillations, over the simple reception of Galenic branches of knowledge.

The municipal physicians and their medical reformation offer a perspective on distinctly artisanal practices: experience, demonstration, an engagement with the vernacular, and professional consensus. However, they do so from a non-artisanal social background. As all were graduates of German, French and Italian universities, no one more embodies the world of scholastic learning than they. Their claim to professional primacy was based not just on an appreciation of the value of new mechanical and technical processes, such as pharmacy, diagnostics and treatment but, also, on an appropriation of their social role. When the Collegium medicum was established in 1592, it elevated university educated physicians above other practitioners in the medical marketplace. It restricted pharmaceutical innovation to physicians, rather than apothecaries, awarded to the physicians jurisdiction over the allocation of medical duties among the medical marketplace, and put in place a set of relationships between physician, patient and polity that endures to this day.