Health and healing in eighteenth-century Germany

Contrary to what one might expect from the very general title, this book is a detailed, archivally-based study of a small, mostly rural state in northern Germany, the duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbuttel. A subtitle might perhaps have been in order here, to warn the unwary student expecting a general textbook covering the whole of Germany. Yet Mary Lindemann's substantial new work is anything but an obscure research monograph destined to be read only by the specialist. Perhaps only those who have worked on similar materials can appreciate the skill and industry that the author has put into deciphering and interpreting the voluminous manuscript sources on which the book is mainly based, and the learning and scholarship that have enabled her to put these sources into a broader context. But everyone interested in the social history of medicine, or in the history of eighteenth-century Germany in general, will read this fluent and stylishly written book with profit. Within the compass of the state she has chosen to study, Lindemann's approach is comprehensive. She begins with a general account of social and administrative structures in the duchy, then moves on to consider the role of the state-appointed local medical officers of health, the Physici. Here already Lindemann's archivally-based approach pays dividends, as she is able to penetrate beyond conventional wisdom to show how difficult it was for many of these officials to win acceptance among the local community, which often resisted their activities with good reason. The case of Dr Christian Loeber, whose insensitive decision to exhume his own child's body to perform an autopsy and obtain anatomical specimens led small-town locals to accuse him of dark practices such as painting the corpse blue and turning it into a mummy, was only one example of many in which the pretensions of the Enlightenment ran up against ingrained popular habits and attitudes. Local people's criticism of Loeber for wasting valuable land in erecting a formal garden with monuments to his favourite poet expressed a practical attitude to health which had much to recommend it, for land in their view should be used for food production, which after all was the foundation for health and well-being. Lindemann's third chapter, at nearly a hundred pages the longest in the book, turns to a wide variety of other medical practitioners, from barber-surgeons and midwives to snake-charmers and executioners. This was a period when definitions of "quackery" hardened …