Preparing Princes or Who May Preserve the Ruler for Eternity?

In the 16th and 17th centuries, medical students from the German-speaking territories would very often set out for Italy especially in order to gain extended anatomical and surgical knowledge. Back home, opportunities to put these additional skills into use were rather narrow, but there were some exceptions. The preparation and embalming of corpses was one of these. This was a topic that had not normally been much focused upon in physicians' writings, but this changed by the middle of the 17th century. From an analysis of some key texts it will become clear that this shift in attention has to do with the increased estimation of surgical skills by physicians. The central item of the paper will be a didactical letter by Balthasar Timaeus (d. 1667), a physician in Pomerania, describing the act of preparing and embalming a corpse to his son, himself a medical student. Timaeus, who had acquired this advanced knowledge of instruments and techniques in Padua during his peregrinatio, passed it on among his family as a surgeon would do. Others almost at the same time did introduce the topic into academic teaching as well, which was a further step of merging the medical and surgical spheres that had, in the Holy Roman Empire, been officially kept well apart. My sources come from the “Physicians’ Correspondences of the German-Speaking Territories, 1500 to 1700” project based at the Bavarian Academy of Science. They further include disputations and other contemporary publications and excerpts on the subject.