A New Concept for Surgery in European Hospitals? Records of Practice in Germany, Italy, and Spain During the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.

The recent discovery of a manuscript has allowed historians to understand the medical routine in a hospital known as the Schneidhaus in Augsburg between the sixteenth and nineteenth century. The context of the manuscript shows that at this institution, non-academic specialists, generally members of the guild of barber-surgeons and barbers, routinely performed surgical cures of intestinal hernia, scrotal swellings, and vesical calculus. The Schneidhaus exclusively admitted patients applying for such specialised treatments and offered no other services.

The problematic legacy of victim specimens from the Nazi era: Identifying the persons behind the specimens at the Max Planck Institutes for Brain Research and of Psychiatry.

Although 75 years have passed since the end of World War II, the Max Planck Society (Max-Planck Gesellschaft, MPG), successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft, KWG), still must grapple with how two of its foremost institutes-the KWI of Psychiatry in Munich and the KWI for Brain Research in Berlin-Buch-amassed collections of brains from victims of Nazi crimes, and how these human remains were retained for postwar research. Initial efforts to deal with victim specimens during the 1980s met with denial and, subsequently, rapid disposal in 1989/1990. Despite the decision of the MPG's president to retain documentation for historical purposes, there are gaps in the available sources.

German gynecologic societies investigating their Nazi past.

Purpose: Research into the activities of German medical specialist associations during the Nazi period is still in its initial stages even today. In the field of gynecology and obstetrics as well, most representatives of the discipline continued to take an attitude based on "concealment and forgetting", even after the turn of the millennium. In order to break with this approach, the Bavarian Society for Obstetrics and Gynecology (Bayerische Gesellschaft für Geburtshilfe und Frauenheilkunde, BGGF) commissioned an interdisciplinary research group to focus on clarifying its Nazi past for the purposes of a history of the institution on the occasion of its centenary.

[Ernst von Metternich (1656-1727). A patient-focused view of the medical marketplace around 1720].

In his medical diary the physician Johann Christoph Götz from Nuremberg recorded his visits as well as his consiliary correspondence. The case of Count Ernst of Metternich who dwelled in Ratisbon and suffered from a bladder stone is particularly well documented. Thus, the source which is focusing the doctor permits to take a look at a section of the medical market managed by the patient around 1720.

[Foreigners and lepers as strangers in early modern imperial towns].

This paper provides insight into interdependent processes by which leprosy and foreignness were constructed in early modern Germany. The results are based on a case study and further source-samples from Imperial towns of the Swabian and Franconian district. As it seems the early modern period was characterized by an ambivalent attitude towards lepers resulting in a variety of ways of inclusion and of exclusion for these persons: The separation from certain forms of social life in the towns (and in the villages belonging to the respective territory) followed the "suspicion" by other inhabitants caused by physical "signs" and the confirmed diagnoses of leprosy by medical experts.

Infection, contagion, and public health in late medieval and early modern German imperial towns.

From today's point of view, the concepts of "miasma" and "contagion" appear to be two mutually exclusive perceptions of the spread of epidemic diseases, and quite a number of historians have tried to discuss the history of public health and epidemic diseases in terms of a progression from the miasmic to the contagionist concept. More detailed local studies, however, indicate how extremely misleading it may be to separate such medical concepts and ideas from their actual historical context. The article presented here, based on local studies in late medieval and early modern imperial towns in southern Germany, demonstrates to what extent the inhabitants of these towns had notions of both "miasma" and "contagion.