ABSTRACT

When the pox reached Augsburg in 1495, the city council responded immediately with the opening of a special hospital for its victims, the Blatterhaus. This instant reaction might suggest that the authorities were well acquainted with the disease phenomenon they were trying to contain. However, according to the earliest archival records offering insights into the medical organisation of the new pox hospital, this was not at all the case. In fact, it took over two decades to negotiate the pox’s nature and treatment. It was only in the early 1520s that the medical practitioners working in the hospital wards and the municipal authorities in charge of the institution reached an agreement over what the pox was and how it should best be treated. This chapter reconstructs these negotiations over the identity of the pox. By doing so it will link the discussions in the Blatterhaus to wider debates over professional duties and hierarchies between two important groups of Augsburg’s official healer community, the academic physicians and the city’s barber-surgeons. I argue that the agreement reached in 1522 over the nature and treatment of the pox has to be understood in close relationship to the struggles between these two healer groups over the official right and authority to define the human body and control its treatment.