Health care and poverty relief in Counter- Reformation Catholic Germany

The attempt to summarise the history of health care and poverty relief in Counter-Reformation Catholic Germany is complicated by an array of evident difficulties. The first factor to name would be the current state of research on the subject, which lacks both comparative summaries1 and newer studies of certain regions or cities. Although some cases have been especially well investigated, of which the primary example is certainly Cologne, the only large Catholic city in Germany,2 conditions in Protestant regions have been on the whole much better researched.