The Spanish crown anticipated that the medical practices in Spain would be replicated in the New World. While there were abundant opportunities to practice medicine in Peru, the opportunities to learn medicine were limited by the lack of universities capable of awarding medical degrees and by the shortage of books to guide students. Meanwhile, those practitioners who came from Spain found that the materia medica they had traditionally used was not always available. How did medical practitioners respond to these conditions? How did they acquire training and did they experiment with the diverse flora and minerals found in the Andes? This paper shows that despite the obstacles that medical practitioners faced they tried to adhere to humoral medical practices. This extended to training indigenous people and African slaves how to prepare medicines and let blood and to seek local substitutes for Old World medicines.

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.

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.

By comparing 17th-century medical dissertations we can study how the strategies of disputation and dissertation changed and migrated from one generation of students to the next. My case study is the prolific thesis writer and supervisor Daniel Sennert (1572-1637), professor of medicine and alchemist at the university of Wittenberg. Among the more than one hundred dissertation students he supervised several went on to become professors themselves who supervised theses in turn. I will study the dissertations supervised by three of Sennert’s intellectual offspring: Daniel Beckher (1594-1655) at the Prussian university of Regiomontanus or Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia); Laurentius Eichstaedt (1596-1660) at the Academic Gymnasium of Gdansk in the Kingdom of Poland; and Werner Rolfinck (1599-1673) at the university of Jena (Duchy of Saxe-Weimar in the Holy Roman Empire). Comparing the theses supervised by Sennert with those supervised by these three student of his brings to light changes and continuities in the methods of writing and orally defending theses in 17th-century European universities. We can expect that professors drew on their own experience in modelling oral performance for their students. The culture of academic performance permeated universities not only through the circulation of texts, but also through the geographical movement characteristic of many academic careers, including those of Sennert and these three students. My paper connects the development of early modern dissertation practices in medicine through the experiences of two generations of doctoral students defending their theses in the descendance of Daniel Sennert.