ABSTRACT
In 1639, a garrison soldier in Ulm, in southwest Germany, fell to the floor as if dead after his comrade threw a radish at his right eye.1 He was brought to the Heilig-Geist-Spital, the imperial city's main hospital, where the physician Johannes Schultheib, better known by the Latinized surname Scultetus, was called to examine him. The career and writings of Johannes Scultetus offer a compelling illustration of how different bodies of knowledge came together in the construction of a learned surgical treatise. In his Armamentarium Chirurgicum, or “surgical armory,” Scultetus gathered information from university lectures, Latin and vernacular treatises, and hands-on work with patients, using the act of writing to allow these different sources to inform and instruct one another. Both the 1655 edition and its expanded versions appeared posthumously since Johannes Scultetus had died unexpectedly in the winter of 1645, at the age of fifty.
