ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates Johann Vochs's vision for a specifically "German" medicine at the intersection of new and worrisome epidemics, the new patriotism of the German Renaissance, and German discontent with Italian scholars and merchants on the eve of the Reformation. It seeks to explain the various ideas and motives behind Vochs's broad reform, and seeks to place Vochs at the forefront of the creation and promotion of a new indigenous medicine in northern Europe. The German Renaissance at the end of the fifteenth century enlightens the origin of Vochs's particularly German medicine, as well as his calls to reform the Church and Holy Roman Empire. The chapter argues that a constellation of factors particular to the early sixteenth century inspired Vochs's turn to a German indigenous medicine and set the conditions for it to flourish more broadly. It explores Vochs's medical ideas, including his thought on the relationship between personal experience and textual authority.