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1. Concept The term addiction (from the Latin addictus, “dedicated/devoted [to a thing]”) was originally a neutral equivalent to “penchant” or “inclination,” before acquiring its modern sense of inner compulsion in the context of opium in the 19th century. The German equivalent, Sucht (from the Gothic  saühts, etymologically related to the English “sick”) is found in glossaries dating back to around the 8th century, and lexicographic evidence shows it to have two fundamental senses up to the 19th century. Originally, it referred to outward…

1. DefinitionToday physiology (from Greek  phýsis and lógos, “theory of nature,” “nature study”) is a subdiscipline of biology and medicine: the theory of the physical, biochemical, and information-processing functions of living beings [6]. This meaning contrasts with its meaning in Greek antiquity (Greek  physiológos, “expert in natural philosophy”). At the beginning of the early modern period, physiology was understood very broadly in the sense of physical science (William Gilbert’s famous  De magnete [“On the Magnet”; 1600] had the subtitle A New Physiology of …

1. Definition Insanity (Latin insania) is a term in the history of medicine and culture that has undergone dramatic changes in meaning since the end of the Middle Ages [6]. In the early modern period, it covered a broad spectrum of possible pathologies, from depressive melancholia (or melancholy) and low spirits to impaired reason and changes in one’s ability to form judgments - a spectrum that was seen as an entire complex of related illnesses in the 19th century. This shift in meaning took place against the backdrop of…

1. Definition and traditions Dentistry, also called stomatology (from the Greek  stóma, “mouth”), is the branch of medicine dealing with conditions of the oral cavity, including the jaw and teeth, while odontology (Latin odontologia, from Greek  odús, odont-, “tooth”) is concerned with the anatomy and physiology of the vertebrate dental system, including the human [1]; [2]; [9]; [4]; [8]; [7].Medieval dentistry continued to owe much to ancient ideas of dental anatomy and humoral tooth ailments. Extractions were done by the bathkeeper or barber-surgeon (Surgery), if the usual  m…

1. Definition, names, and originSyphilis is a chronic illness that is usually transmitted by sexual intercourse. The modern name goes back to the Italian physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro and his didactic poem  Syphilidis sive morbi Gallici libri tres (“Three Books on Syphilis or the French Disease”; printed in Verona 1530 and Rome 1531, but probably written in 1521). Independently of references to Fracastoro, this name appeared occasionally in the 18th century but did not prevail until the 19th century. Earlier terms include  morbus Gallicus, mal Frantzos, Spanish pox, ma…

1. IntroductionThe old authorities of university medicine were thrown out in the 17th century, and the era of empirical, experimental medicine began. William Harvey shook the foundations of the ancient doctrine of the humors (Humoralism) with his experimental research and description of the circulation of the blood, and new concepts of medical thought and action - post-Paracelsian iatrochemistry and Cartesian iatrophysics (iatromechanics) - usurped its traditional place. Chemical and mechanist thinking based on experimental findings now gained influence in medicine.W…

An anatomical theater was the site of public anatomical dissection in the early centuries of the modern period. The concept goes back to Alessandro Benedetti (1445-1525), an Italian physician and professor of surgery and anatomy in Padua [5]. He was probably the first to have a separate wooden structure built for anatomical dissections at the University of Padua (ca. 1490). Benedetti’s successful and influental major work,  Anatomice, sive Historia corporis humani (Venice 1502: “Anatomy, or, History of the Human Body”), probably contributed to the spread of the id…

1. ConceptNaturopathy in the strict sense took shape in the German-speaking world in the early 19th century, inspired by Rousseau’s demand “back to nature” (Rousseauism). It vehemently opposed allopathic school medicine, its dangerous drugs, and its excessive use of bleeding and voiding therapies, and promoted instead a turn to natural methods of healing and living. To begin with, the focus was entirely on hydrotherapy (Baths, therapeutic) and vegetarianism. This core was expanded over the course…

1. Definition There were already medical faculties (from the Latin  facultas medica; “medical faculty,” “medical power,” figuratively “medical corporation”) at medieval universities. Within the corporation of the university, they formed an autonomous venue of medical training that awarded medical degrees, that is, essentially the title of licentiate (Latin  licentia doctorandi; “licence to teach”) or a medical doctorate (Latin  doctor medicinae), following the passing of an examination. Later, they also acted as regulatory authorities for medical qual…

1. Concept The Natural History School (German: Naturhistorische Schule) was a tendency of the first half of the 19th century in clinical medicine, distinguished by its strictly empirical procedures and rejecting on principle the use of general theories of illness (e.g. humoralism, vitalism, Broussaiism, Brunonianism, homeopathy, etc.; cf. Therapeutic concepts). It was therefore in conscious opposition to schools of medical thought based on natural philosophy (e.g. that of Schelling). Instead, it advocat…

1. Concept The term gynecology is modern, and reflects the late establishment of the specialty at 19th-century medical faculties (Medicine, faculty of). It first emerged in competition with the older and more general term gynaikeía (Greek “women's matters”), only in the early 18th century in the treatise by the Dresden city physician Martin Schurig,  Gynaecologia (Dresden-Leipzig 1730). The term first appears in the title of a German-language textbook only in 1820, with Carl Gustav Carus’ Lehrbuch der Gynaekologie (“Textbook of Gynecology”). During the 16th and 17th ce…

1. DefinitionThe term psychiatry (from Greek  psychḗ, “soul,” “mind,” and  iatrós, “physician”) was coined in 1808 as a Greek neologism by Johann Christian Reil, a physician in Halle (originally Psychiaterie [4]; [5]; [12]), in the sense of the art or science of healing the soul or mind. Until well into the 19th century, the term also included a broad spectrum of neurological illnesses such as epilepsy and St. Vitus’ dance ( Huntington’s chorea).The history of psychiatry can be divided into three major periods from its beginnings to the early 20 century [14]; [6]. (1) For the pe…

1. Concept Until the mid-17th century, the concept of health in the early modern period was still dominated by the ancient doctrine of the humors (humoralism and physiology) and dietetics. In the second half of the 17th century, as humoral physiology lost ground, other ideas of health took its place from the 18th to the early 19th centuries, drawing primarily on mechanistic (iatromechanical), animistic, and vitalistic views of human life in health and illness (Animism; Vitalism). Against the backd…

1. Definition The word “tuberculosis” (from the Latin  tuberculum, “protuberance”; - osis, “functional disorder”) first occurs in medical titles of the early 19th century alongside the Greek/Latin phthisis. The more usual terms were “(pulmonary) consumption” in English and  Schwindsucht  (shrinkage sickness) or  Lungenauszehrung (lung consumption) in German [15]: “phthisis heist zu teutsch die schwintsucht und kumpt von einem geschwer oder von einer feulnis der lungen und sie ist ein todtenliche sucht unnd ir ist auch muelich zu helffen” (“Phthisis is called in German  schw…

1. DefinitionHomeopathy is a concept of illness and therapy developed by the German physician Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843) based on the ideas of vitalism, though its therapeutic conclusions differ radically from the notions of illness in vitalism and earlier ideas. According Hahnemann’s theory, the holistic physical phenomenon of illness is a “disorder” of the vital force caused by pathogenic stimuli. The physician encourages the vital force in its resistance not – as in conventional medicine (allopathy) – by means of antagonists ( contraria contrariis; “o…

1. BasicsIatrophysics (from Greek  iatrós, “Arzt”; physis, “inanimate nature”) was a 17th and 18th-century theory and practice of medicine that interpreted all phenomena of health and illness as dependent on the internal physical structure of the body, its external form, and mechanical alterability [5]. With reductionistic simplification, it attempted to apply the findings of the new experimental natural sciences to the realm of life, where everything must also be explicable physically, reconstructible mechanically (iatromechanics), …

1. Definition Anatomical (or Solid) pathology denotes the systematic search for the causes of illness (Greek pathología, i.e. the doctrine of the origin, course and symptoms of diseases) and is based on pathological anatomic changes of specific organs or tissues  (Latin solida, “solid constituents”). It is in opposition to humoral doctrine (Humoralism), which treats the non-fluid morphological substratum of the organism merely as the venue of processes based on humoral physiology.Wolfgang Uwe Eckart 2. Beginnings It was not until the 17th century that medical interest …

1. Introduction Health and illness in the early modern period up to the mid-17th century were essentially understood, both by academics and the general public, in terms of the ancient theory of humors (humoral physiology/pathology, from Latin humores, “fluids”) and dietetics, and this view survived much longer in popular and alternative medicine. Only as the ideas of humoral physiology were superseded in the second half of the 17th century did other concepts of health emerge in their stead. During the 18th and early 19th centuri…

1. Definition The term cholera is found in Hebrew as chaul rah (“fierce sickness”). It is etymologically unclear whether the name of the disease comes from the Greek choládes (“intestines”) and refers to intestinal illness, or from the Greek words for “bile” ( chólos) and "river" ( rhóos) (“river of bile”), relating to the doctrine of the four humors, or whether in reference to profuse diarrhea it is related to  cholédra (“gutter," “drainpipe”). Unlike the cholera nostras that had long been known in Europe (so-called “English cholera” in England;  Gallenruhr or “bile flux” in the …

1. Medieval rootsSince the high Middle Ages, besides independent physicians ( medicus) there were also physicians employed by secular and ecclesiastical princes, monasteries, and urban administrations who served their employers directly. They were given the Latin title  physicus (informed about nature). The distinction, sometimes still vague, between the general medical duties of a  medicus and the special duties of a  physicus (similar to Latin  physica and  medicina for medicine) was probably first clarified in the Old Empire by the medical ordinance …

1. Definition The most infallible and timeless subjective markers and symptoms in general are the sudden, unexpected, and even unnatural perceived increase in temperature in the body, accompanied by sweating, paradoxical-seeming fits of shivering, debility, and, often, aches and pains. Texts on fever from European Antiquity define fever as significant, even when there was no distinguishing criterion in the governing theory of disease of the time to allow for further differentiation.In the 15th and 16th centuries, the conception of fever originating with Hippocrat…

1. Definition Herbals in the early modern period were printed books about plants. These compendia offered detailed descriptions of plants and herbal remedies with explanations of their medical applications. Works often also included animals, animal products, and minerals that were used in medicine.Wolfgang Uwe Eckart 2. Precursors and development in early centuries Ancient botanical works and herbals served as important sources for reference on medical and herbal knowledge until well into the early modern period (Pharmacy). The main authorities w…

1. ConceptScientific medicine denotes the tendency in medicine of the 18th and 19th centuries to take scientific methods and results from physics and chemistry as its basis and to apply them consistently (see Experimental medicine). Associated with this tendency was the intention, at least, to turn away from holistic or purely philosophical concepts of medicine, especially vitalism, and – in Germany – the Romantic natural philosophy of Schelling, and to stop applying them to medical practice.Wolfgang Uwe Eckart 2. Principles From classical antiquity until the 17th ce…

1. Beginnings in LeidenIn the history of European medicine, the clinical school made its first appearance in the late 17th century at the University of Leiden, which played a pioneering role in the birth of clinical medicine, when for the first time ever instruction was given alongside the sickbed (Greek klíne, “bed, couch”). Previously the faculty of medicine (Medicine, faculty of) had limited itself to theoretical instruction; including a hospital in the teaching was not considered.In the first half of the 17th century in Leiden, Otto van Heurne had already sou…

1. DefinitionPain (from Latin  poena via Old French  peine; German  Schmerz from OHG  smerza/ smerzo and MHG  smerze/ smerz; Greek  álgos; Latin  dolor, acerbitas) is a complex sensory perception; as an acute event, it serves as a warning sign and guidepost, but chronic pain has lost this element. An early modern synonym of  Schmerz is Pein (from OHG  pîna and MHG  pîne/ pîn, from Latin  poena, “penance, punishment”; cf. English  pain), usually associated with punishment, torture, torment, and so on (cf. German  peinliche Befragung, “painful inquiry,” i.e. torture). In an…

1. Theories before Harvey From antiquity into the 17th century, people generally believed that the blood circulated centrifugally in the body, according to the canonical theory of the circulation of the blood of the Greco-Roman physician Galen of  Pergamum. Blood was produced by the liver, passed through the vena cava into the right ventricle, and then passed through the cadiac septum into the left ventricle, whence it was distributed throughout  the body; it was finally dissipated at the periphery …

1. The theory and its background Brunonianism, a medical reform movement, was inspired by the Scottish physician John Brown (1736–1788), who considered life a condition aroused and maintained by internal and external stimuli. The fundamental life force, he maintained, was the biological potential for stimulus or excitation. The critical factor determining the sickness or health of the human body must be considered the individual’s excitability (Latin incitabilitas), the readiness and ability of the organism to respond to stimuli. After c. 1700, a variety of …

1. The concept“Irritability,” from Latin  irritabilis, irritabilitas (see also “sensibility” from Latin  sensibilis, sensibilitas), is a medical description of the condition of the body with regard to its ability to respond to (external) sensory stimuli and to react to them. Abnormalities of irritability and sensibility were considered symptomatic of illness.Around 1700, the Cartesian-mechanistic conception of life came in for increased criticism (Mechanism). Although physical-mechanistic reductionism initially held great attraction as an expl…

1. Starting points for early modern anatomy There was certainly no routine prohibition of dissections of human bodies in medieval anatomy. This was not what we might call an autopsia in the modern sense, i.e. in the sense of personal observation and interpretation of the findings of the dissection as actually found, because the self-contained dogma of humoral pathology (doctrine of humours; see also Humoralism) and of the anatomy and physiology associated with this doctrine offered a model of explanation and action that could be extrapolated from to apply to almost all sicknesses. A search for new anatomical/physiological knowledge did not seem called for at the beginning o…

1. Medieval forms of public health…

1. Medicine Preservative (from Latin  praeservare, “preserve,” “prevent”) was originally a term from the technical language of medicine, which then was borrowed into other areas. German Präservativ in the sense of condom did not b…

1. IntroductionVitalism (from the Latin vita, “life”) was a tendency within medicine and philosophy of the 18th century that postulated the existence of a life force ( vis vitalis) that controlled and sustained life. The driving force of vitalism was the theory of the soul advanced in opposition to Cartesian mechanism by Georg Ernst Stahl (Animism) [9. 293–310]; [7]; [8]. This view focused primarily on the energizing, life-sustaining forces of each individual organ ( vita propria) and of the body as a whole.The vitalism proposed by the French medics Théophile de Bordeu a…

1. From the bath-house to the thermal spring The decline of the medieval urban bathing culture and the souring of its reputation probably came about primarily because of the rapid spread of syphilis from the late 15th century In many places, this led to the closure of town bath-houses (Bathkeeper), which were held to be dangerous reservoirs of infection (Illness). As this was happening, however, rising timber …

1. ConceptEpidemiology (from the Greek  epídemos, “spread among the people”, and   lógos…

1. Definition Therapeutic concepts are remedial theories in medicine that derive approaches to treatment based on a particular understanding of illness. These then follow theories and rules that are relatable in practice. For the early modern period, a fundamental distinction can be drawn between magical and rational therapeutic concepts (see below, 2.). The basis for the rational concept of academic medicine was the ancients’ threefold subdivision of therapy (dietetic, surgical, pharmaceutical). Dietetics here also pursued preventive (prophylactic) goals and ai…

1. Basics In the course of the 17th century, the hospital of the ancient religious and charitable type was transformed into an institution devoted entirely to caring for the sick …

1. Definition and background In the 16th and 17th centuries, medical codes in the form of government decrees, edicts, and ordinances primarily regulated the behavior of the various medical occupational groups and their representatives (Medic) tow…

1. Terminological history Hygíeia (or Hygeía, Latin Salus) in Greek mythology was the daughter of Asclepius and the goddess of health. The word “hygiene” derives from her name. During the early modern period, the sense of the term hygíeia expanded. Zedler’s  Univer…

1. Definition and originsFrom the 19th century on, “health insurance” referred to a solidarity-based community healthcare system for journeymen and laborers that would take care of people who had fallen on hard times due to illness, and of their families. Thus, health insurance can be seen as an expression of social-paternalistic efforts on the part of factory owners and entrepreneurs. The phrase “health insurance” first appeared in today’s sense in the second half of the 18th century (e.g. Kranken-Casse zu Paris für fremde evang. Sattlergesellen, (“Health insurance in Paris for foreign Protestant journeymen saddlers,” around 1780). It frequently co-occurred in the 1840s in connection with the social question in the run-up to the German Revolution…

1. General The term  medic (German Medizinalperson) here encompasses all the early modern non-academic medical practitioners who practiced their healing arts for the “common man” [16] in fixed locations or as itinerants. Medics ( Medizinalpersonen) “are individuals whose occupations focus on the ailing body and the recovery of the sick, including physicians, barber surgeons, obste…

1. Diseases and plaguesThe correct identification of early modern plagues and epidemics in terms of modern pathology is highly problematical. Even evidence of symptom correlation is open to doubt. This is true of the plethora of pestilential fevers, but no less true in the case of illnesses that are apparently identifiable without difficulty, but behind which may lurk in principle any infection with epidemic propensity. The learned world of the 15th and 16…

1. Concept Until the mid-17th century, the early modern concept of illness was still primarily shaped by classical humoralism and dietetics. The ideas of humoral physiology were gradually replaced by other concepts of illness, which from the 18th to the early 19th century were based on mechanistic, animistic, and vitalist notions of human life in health and illness. Around the middle of the 19th century, thanks to the development of scientific physiology, cellular pathology, and bacteri…

1. Concept and terms The German term for accident,  Unfall (Middle High German unval, ungeval; compare chance; French  accident) means an unforeseen event or misadventure, generally relating to personal injury or material damage, and also military defeats as well as the special life and death circumstances of “famous men,” as for instance in the 1570 German translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium (orig. 1356-1373) by Hieronymus Ziegler as merckliche und erschröckliche unfahl . verderben unnd Sterben großmächtiger Kayser (“noteworthy and shockin…

1. Concept and scopeThe term “quack,” short for “quacksalver” (Early New Dutch quacksalver, German  Quacksalber, composed of quacken, “to cry,” “to quack [like a duck],” and  salver/Salber, from the OHG …

1. DefinitionIn the first centuries of the early modern period, surgery (German Wundarznei) was the manual or operative treatment of illness, in the narrower…

1. Ramazzini and his precursors Early modern occupational medicine began with the seminal treatise of the Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini,  De morbis artificium diatriba (Modena 1700; “Investigation of the Diseases of Artisans and Craftsmen”), clearly comparable in its significance for early industrial hygiene to Morgagni’s …

1. TerminologyThe term vermin (French  vermine, German  Ungeziefer) is attested since approximately 1300. The German term goes back to the 12th century, as the OHG root word  zebar became modern German  ziefer (animal). The German root may possibly have meant a sacrificial animal in the narrower sense, so that the double pejorative prefix  un- and  ge- might suggest animals not fit for sacrifice. Synony…

1. Terminological historyThe word “organism” (from the Greek  órganon/Latin  organum, “implement”, “instrument [musical or surgical]”) first appeared in its Latin form in texts of the high Middle Ages. However, only two attestations of the term exist from before the mid-17th century, one from an alchemical context in the 11th century, the other from the context of church music in the 12th [7. 320]. The term “organism” as a derivative of “organic” and “organ,” both known since Greco-Roman antiquity as terms denoting the living structure of the body and its…

1. Concept The word “hospital” derives from “hospitality” (Latin  hospitalitas), a derivation found in various forms in a number of European languages (e.g. German hopitalhûs, Spital, Spittel; French hôpital; Spanish hospital; Italian  ospedale) [2]; [1]. From the outset, the concept reflected a double function of care for the sick and responsibility for all forms of need.Maike Rotzoll 2. Middle Ages The development of the hospital in the medieval west was for the most part closely associated with the principle of Christian caritas (Charity). From the early days of Christian…

1. Europe 1.1. Renaissance 1.1.1. Medical Humanism and ReformationInfluenced by the Renaissance and Humanism, medicine, as part of the  studia humaniora from the 14th century, also undertook a philological and critical turn towards its ancient foundations and sources …