Making Physicians, Volume I: Tradition, Teaching, and Trials at Leiden University, 1575-1639 (Clio Medica, 106)

Oversized hardcover, xiv + 457 pages, NOT ex-library. Shipping weight over 1kg. Pencil underlining and/or marginalia on 126 pages (some very sparse). Else little wear. Issued without a dust jacket. -- This study reconstructs the training of physicians at the University of Leiden from its founding in 1575 through to 1639, asking how medical students became Galenic physicians in the early modern era. The author, a historian of science and medicine at the University of Notre Dame, guides the reader through the ancient sources, textbooks, lecture halls, gardens, dissecting rooms and patient bedsides of one of the most important and popular medical schools in late Renaissance Europe, which drew hundreds of students from across the continent. The standard pedagogy combined book learning with hands-on experience. Professors and students embraced Galen's models for integrating reason and experience, and cultivated humanist scholarship and argumentation, which shaped their study of chymistry, medical botany, and clinical practice at patients' bedsides in private homes and in the city hospital. Through this education, thousands of students learned to emphasise personal experience, the observation and communication of facts, intellectual and manual skill, and even the performance of tests and experiments. A significant thread concerns how medical education drove the production of new pathological knowledge. Following Galen's emphasis on finding and treating the sick parts, professors correlated symptoms with evidence from frequent post-mortem dissections, leading students and teachers to develop a new, anatomically localised theory of consumption centred on the identification of pulmonary tubercles. This finding challenges standard narratives about the origins of anatomical pathology and evidence-based clinical practice by demonstrating that systematic correlation of clinical observation with post-mortem evidence was already embedded in university medical pedagogy well before its supposed modern emergence. The book provides the historical data required to understand how the 'Leiden model' of medical education influenced the development of medical faculties across Europe and Britain. This volume is an essential reference for researchers of early modern Dutch history, the history of universities, and the evolution of the medical profession. Areas of interest: medical pedagogy, history of anatomy, clinical teaching, early modern Leiden. …