Medicine and the Body in Early Modern Europe

This volume brings together essays on a wide range of topics, from the popular notion of ‘climacterical’ years believed to recur every seventh year, and the origins and development of the concept of ‘palliative’ care in premodern medicine, to the early modern understanding of ‘melancholia’ as a disease rather than just a temperament, and its visual representation in the famous ‘Melancholia’ paintings of Lukas Cranach the Elder. It examines the casuistic training, empirical observations, and public self-fashioning of learned physicians, and explores major concepts of early modern medical theory, such as ‘innate heat’ and diseases of the ‘total substance’ as presented and elaborated in Avicenna's ‘Canon medicinae and in Daniel Sennert's atomistic interpretation of body and soul. Published for the first time in an English translation, these essays offer readers many illuminating insights into the fascinating world of early modern medicine.

Michael Stolberg is Senior Professor at the University of Würzburg, in Germany. Originally trained as a physician, he began working as an Assistant Professor at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Medical Sociology in Munich in 1989 and, in 1994, received a PhD in history and philosophy at the University of Munich. Over the following years, he worked as a Research Fellow in Venice, Cambridge (UK), and Munich, and in 2004 was awarded the Chair of History of Medicine in Würzburg. He has published widely on learned medical theory and practice, the patient experience, and body history in early modern Europe. Among his books are Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe (2011), A History of Palliative Care, 1500-1970 (2017), and Early Modern Physicians and Everyday Medical Practice in the Renaissance (2021).