ABSTRACT
Not so very long ago, historians of medicine and Reformation scholars hardly took notice of one another. In recent years that situation has begun to change, and it is now possible to assert straightforwardly that “the Reformation, urban culture, and medicine were intertwined in … crucial ways.”1 Yet the questions currently being posed have to do almost exclusively with the Reformation’s influence on medical thought and practice, as if the connections all worked in one direction. This essay seeks to uncover some different dimensions of the relationship by exploring ways in which the development and popularization of certain medical ideas, practices, and institutions during the decades before 1520 helped prepare the ground for a major reform movement in the German and Swiss towns. My focus is on the world of urban physicians and surgeons. Both their theoretical orientation and their professional goals, I argue, led these medical thinkers and practitioners to cultivate new lay attitudes about health, healing, and the common good; thus they helped to shape what Bernd Moeller once called “the unique mentality of the German townspeople before the Reformation.”2 By the same token, we have reason to think that town physicians were especially predisposed to become early supporters of a movement that looked to cure the ills of Christendom.
