Le médecin bohémien Georg Handsch

Humanist self-fashioning and ordinary medical practice. The Bohemian physician Georg Handsch (1529–c. 1578) and his notebooks

Prof Michael Stolberg (University of Würzburg) 

24th November

Wellcome Library, 183 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
Doors open at 6pm prompt, the seminar will start at 6.15pm.

The professional identity of learned physicians underwent some major changes in the 16th century. The rise of humanism reshaped the world of the ‘res publica literaria’ in which learned physicians prominently participated. At the same time, growing numbers of physicians settled in large and small towns all over Central and Western Europe and sought to make a living as medical practitioners. Drawing on the voluminous notebooks of a little known and rather unsuccessful Bohemian physician by the name of Georg Handsch, and some other physicians’ letters and practice journals, this paper will take a look at the ways in which fairly ‘ordinary’ physicians coped with this tension: how they self-fashioned themselves as humanist intellectuals, but also engaged with the medical lay-world and interacted with (and learnt from) the townsfolk in an effort to secure a place in urban society and to hold their own in the medical marketplace.

More info here: http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2015/11/humanist-self-fashioning-and-ordinary-medical-practice/