ABSTRACT
Göttingen is quite generally considered as ‘the leading university of eighteenthcentury Germany’.1 It enjoyed a high reputation from its foundation in 1736, but mainly from the 1770s to the early decades of the nineteenth century. Contemporaries identified four main factors responsible for its superiority: the funds and quality of its institutions – primarily the library – its orientation towards practical application, the (scientific) excellence of its professors, and the diligence of its students. Modern historiography generally reproduces and adopts this assessment – and there are no indications that would urge us to challenge it.2 However – and this is the main argument of this chapter – these four factors, their significance and interactions can only partly be described as a logical result of the original concept of the foundation, but developed, rather, through a momentum of their own, and contain contradictions which at first sight seem to be at odds with the alleged general character of the university. This is certainly the case for the medical faculty and its development in the first decades, on which I shall focus my attention. I have not studied new archive material and can thus not furnish a detailed study of the medical faculty – which is still lacking – but will, rather, try
1 Notker Hammerstein, ‘Epilogue: the Enlightenment’, in A history of the university in Europe. Vol. II: Universities in early modern Europe (1500-1800), ed. Hilde de RidderSymoens (Cambridge, 1996), 621-40, here 629.
