The Physicians' Community in Pre-Thirty Years' War Bohemia

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F44555601%3A13410%2F22%3A43897280" target="_blank" >RIV/44555601:13410/22:43897280 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110776874-016" target="_blank" >http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110776874-016</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110776874-016" target="_blank" >10.1515/9783110776874-016</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

The Physicians' Community in Pre-Thirty Years' War Bohemia

Original language description

The medical profession or community has always been the subject of interest of other social or professional groups. There are two main reasons for that. First, doctors were (and still are) the ones who interfered with peoples&apos; lives by taking care of their health. Secondly, any medical intervention that went deeper into the human body, even as a part of a treatment, was, in fact, a violation of a certain taboo in medieval and early modern society, and in some forms it prevails even in our days (e.g., vaccine hesitaters [vaxxers], be it covid-19 vaccine, hexavalent vaccine, or influenza vaccine). And it was this breaking of the taboo that became a contributing factor to the superior and, at the same time to some extent, exclusive social status of members of the medical profession in the Middle Ages. The medical community, formed in this spirit, was, under certain circumstances, viewed more critically by other social and professional groups and individuals. These negative views sought to make the medical community (justifiably or unjustifiably) responsible for the unwanted state of public or personal health, for socially and medically pathological phenomena in society, or even for the death of an individual. Such views emerged in particular since the mid-fourteenth century due to the plague against which the medical profession at that time had no known effective preventive measures or treatments. The objective of this paper was to analyze, at first, a Czech-language plague (anti-plague) text written by the clerical author Jan of Bakov to show, on the one hand, how the community of early modern physicians was judged by the Church authors. Thanks to their preaching (orally) and printed sermons religious scholars were able to communicate their point of view to the majority of the population of early modern Bohemia, and so, therefore, their stance toward physicians was decisive. On the other hand, the physicians were trying to defend their own professional community, their social status, and medicine itself by any means necessary, even by pretense. This resulted into intellectual clashes, which were illustrated, in the second part, by the case of the medical doctor Boulle who was incarcerated for applying up-to-date preventive and medical measures against plague epidemic. Thus, this paper aimed at answering the question regarding the social role of physicians in early modern Czech society.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

C - Chapter in a specialist book

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

60101 - History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)

Project

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Continuities

S - Specificky vyzkum na vysokych skolach

Publication year

2022

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Book/collection name

Communication, Translation, and Community in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period: New Cultural-Historical and Literary Perspectives

ISBN

978-3-11-077680-5

Number of pages of the result

22

Pages from-to

439-460

Number of pages of the book

632

Publisher name

Walter de Gruyter

Place of publication

Berlin - Boston

UT code for WoS chapter

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