Practice and power: the rise and disappearance of the Franzosenärzte, or doctors of the French pox, in Nuremberg, 1495–1560

During the late fifteenth century a new category of medical practitioner appeared in the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire: the Franzosenarzt or French pox doctor. Until now, there has been no dedicated study of these practitioners. Through an analysis of municipal records from Nuremberg (circa 1495 to 1560), this paper offers the first dedicated investigation of the Franzosenärzte in this city, focusing on uncovering their relationships with Nuremberg’s civic and medical hierarchies. It demonstrates why the Franzosenärzte gained a footing within the city’s municipal healthcare system, but remained subject to the suspicions of the civic and medical authorities. These suspicions, combined with a competitive medical marketplace and Nuremberg’s economic difficulties, precipitated the disappearance of the Franzosenärzte from the city around 1557. Nevertheless, for a brief moment, the Franzosenärzte’s practical expertise in treating the French pox unsettled Nuremberg’s nascent medical hierarchy and the ambitions of the city’s physicians.

Cancer Quackery

This chapter brings in patients and practitioners whose views on cancer diverged from those of the London and Edinburgh elites. Analysis of their perspectives demonstrates that the climate of pessimism surrounding cancer’s intractability was not hegemonic, and that various voices of dissent existed both within and without the ‘regular’ profession. This chapter reconsiders the medical marketplace and places the concept of incurability at the centre of patient choice and professional self-fashioning. The suffering that cancer patients were willing to undergo suggest that for many the diagnosis of an incurable disease and subsequent offers of palliative care alone were unsatisfying. Incurability made space for a crowded medical marketplace that catered for desperately ill people and provided treatments of last resort.

Lust for life: coping with tuberculosis in late nineteenth-century Europe

The paper uses the correspondence of three Finns – Elias Erkko, Henrik Erkko and Hilda Asp – to analyse the conceptual and practical means with which late nineteenth-century-educated Europeans coped with ill health in general and tuberculosis in particular. While the need to gain control over (the threat of) disease may well be universal, the specific coping methods are historical and context-specific. They are both conceptual and practical, both individual and collective. The paper focuses on the 1880s and 1890s, a period when tuberculosis provided an especially lucrative subsector of the booming European medical marketplace. Sanatorium treatment was still only one among many treatment options, and the theory of the bacterial causation of tuberculosis was far from being universally accepted. The paper charts the options available for people suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis and analyses the eclectic, sometimes idiosyncractic, ways that they combined elements from different conceptual scripts and therapeutic traditions.

“Physician’s prescriptions accurately prepared” - The Mid-Nineteenth-Century Prescription Books of Four Gloucester Chemists

Britain’s mid-nineteenth-century healthcare economy has often been described as a “medical marketplace” in which struggling doctors faced intense competition from a range of unqualified rivals. Chemists and druggists, who proliferated in industrial cities and supposedly prospered by exploiting the poor and the gullible, are widely regarded as having presented a serious threat to medical livelihoods. However, the activities of four Gloucester chemists show how the dispensing of medical prescriptions brought individual chemists and doctors closer together. Competition between chemists and druggists for this trade was intense and it was instrumental in establishing them as trusted community pharmacists and giving impetus to the process of professionalization. Prescription books, an under-represented source in the literature, also show that customers for prescription medicines were surprisingly socially diverse and that most prescriptions were collected by women, with significant variation in dispensing activity through the week. This, and the volume of prescriptions being dispensed, suggest prescription medicines were regularly being used to treat chronic and less serious ailments, where collection could await normal shopping days. Significantly, prescriptions were the property of the patients and could be re-presented whenever they thought fit. For some patients, it thus effectively became an instrument of self-medication.