ABSTRACT
Johann Anton Edler von Wolter (1711-87) was the favourite physician of Maximilian III Joseph of Bavaria (r. 1745-77), one of Germany’s most powerful Catholic rulers with an interest in enlightened ideas.1 As few of von Wolter’s personal papers have survived what we know about him has been largely drawn from contemporary accounts. The problem with these, however, is that contemporaries profoundly disagreed on his persona.2 Some stressed that he was one of the founders and an active member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (1759)3 and praised his allegedly endless pursuit of the progress and happiness of mankind on the basis of reason and the economic well-being of his patron’s state. He was one of the ‘pillars of today’s medical art’ – indeed ‘the Bavarian Hippocrates’. Others, however, saw him as slick courtier, extraordinarily selfish, completely ignorant of medical theory and incompetent at medical practice, and far more interested in financial gain and personal fame than the care of his patients. His membership in the Akademie, they insist, was nothing but an excuse to support and foster the careers of his true friends, Bavaria’s most ‘reactionary’ group, the Jesuits. Like them, his tricks and sweet talk lured even the most powerful under his evil spell. In short, this was a man made up of nothing but ‘all the human weaknesses’. This paper is part of a larger project, which aims at reassessing von Wolter within the specific socio-cultural context of the socalled Catholic Enlightenment of eighteenth-century absolutist Bavaria.
