‘Like the bees, who neither suck nor generate their honey from one flower’: The Significance of the peregrinatio academica for Danish Medical Students in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

doi:10.4324/9781315260723-16

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‘Like the bees, who neither suck nor generate their honey from one flower’: The Significance of the peregrinatio academica for Danish Medical Students in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries

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ABSTRACT

For medical students in post-Reformation Denmark-Norway, study abroad was not only an ambition but a necessity, for the simple reason that the country’s only university, the University of Copenhagen (1479), after its post-Reformation refoundation in 1537, remained understaffed and underfunded for decades. Whether students attended a centre of medical excellence or settled for more modest medical faculties closer to home – in Germany – was, of course, dictated by their financial circumstances.