Pupils Gone Putrid: The Moral and Intellectual Perils of Medical Peregrinations

In 1624 the Wittenberg professor of medicine Daniel Sennert (1572-1637) wrote to his brother-in-law and fellow physician Michael Döring (d. 1641) expressing grave concerns about a former student who was peregrinating from university to university and denigrating Sennert’s reputation wherever he went. The situation was so disturbing that Sennert reported he was losing sleep and that his dreams had been invaded by the traitor’s antics abroad. The student in question was Friedrich von Monau (1592-1659), son of the famous Calvinist polymath and jurist Jakob Monau (1546-1603), and reports of his behavior occupy a striking portion of Sennert’s and Döring’s correspondence throughout the 1620s. Beyond commenting upon their intellectual disagreements with Monau, and especially his manner of writing in his dissertation, Sennert and Döring critiqued his extravagant and profligate lifestyle, even down to his manner of dress, which they regarded as all of a piece with his adoption of foreign learning. The two physicians’ agitations about this student illuminate some of the challenges that arose from increasing cosmopolitanism among students eager to demonstrate international credentials. The episode reveals concerns about the national identity of medicine during the infancy of the medical Republic of Letters and highlights several major boundaries between divergent medical factions, showing how these ran along intellectual but also social, moral, and confessional lines.