Medicus politicus - medical conceptions for the protection and betterment of the natural human body in times of crisis

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The project deals with the idea of an ideal political physician who is committed to the protection and amelioration of human nature in general and of collective health in the early modern state. In times of social and political destabilization, some physicians regarded the protection of the vulnerable human body as their special task. On the threshold of the 17th century, this increasing sense of responsibility led several contemporary exponents of medicine to see themselves as inseparably connected with the political dimension of their vocation. Within this framework our research focusses on the question of how collapses of social order motivated physicians to draft medical models for the protection and preservation of human health in which they drew on the authorities of natural philosophy. In order to be politically effective and to assert its authority in the daily struggle of competing practitioners, ¿good¿, ¿rational¿ and learned medicine needed grounds and justification. This is reflected in the changes which the image of the ideal physician underwent in the course of the 16th and 17th centuries. We will reconstruct these changing ideas in deontological treatises and texts about practical surgery such as the observationes chirurgicae. The interaction between these two types of medical literature will form the basis of our research focussing on the ambivalent concept of a medicus politicus. At the beginning of the 17th century, writings dealing with the idea of the medicus politicus emerge as a new literary genre promoting medico-ethical conceptions and a new type of physician whose range of influence is much broader than that envisaged by classical conceptions of self-regulation. The politically committed physicians speak out for a re-ordering of the medical system in the early modern state. By influencing governmental authorities they seek to protect the community from bad doctors, and to prompt the authorities to secure the quality of medical treatment through regulation. A comparative analysis of the pioneering writings of the Jewish physician Rodrigo de Castro (David Namias, 1546-1627), and the surgeon Wilhelm Fabry of Hilden (1560-1634) forms the nucleus of our research. Nourished by Hippocratic- Galenic, Christian-reformist, and Jewish traditions of a self-reflective medicine, these physicians put all their efforts into maintaining and restoring that most precious of goods: health. In preventing diseases, treating war wounds and struggling against plague and dysentery, these physicians also fulfilled an effective political role. Their conviction that knowledge of fragile human nature and a professional ethics based on religious belief was powerfully underlined by their writings and self-fashioning as physicians with a public mission.