Introduction

Communities great and small across Europe from the thirteenth century to the twentieth have bound doctors by oath of office and contract for public service. Physicians provided citizen care, helped govern, and often led in public life. Civic Medicine stakes out this timely subject by focusing on its golden age, when cities rivaled territorial states in local and global Europe and when civic doctors were central to the rise of shared, organized written information about the human and natural world. This opens the prospect of a long history of knowledge and action shaped more by community and responsibility than by the market or the state, exchange or power.