ABSTRACT
This chapter reconstructs early modern medical certification as negotiation both on paper and orally around it. Evaluative certification was integral to the functioning of a polity, involving not only patients and officeholding surgeons and doctors, but also the city council. This is shown, first, by sampling three centuries of medical inspection certificates (Schauzettel) preserved in the archives of the south German town of Nördlingen; and, second, through a case study of interlocking conflicts between medical examiners in the 1590s. Examinations were often initiated by patients. Authorities frequently demanded further examination, for example, as to why a cure had not succeeded. The sick, too, demanded repeated certification, as a way of negotiating for a specific treatment or a different label for an illness. Conflict could burst the bounds of paper’s ordering power yet always came back to it. Government and inhabitants expected civic doctors and surgeons to act as integrated citizens rather than scholarly evaluators. Use of Latin medical terms in certificates did not necessarily reflect certifying physicians’ learned publications and correspondence. Thus, the relation between medical knowing in local political communities and in European scholarly communities is shown to merit further study.
