ABSTRACT
From as early as the thirteenth century to the twentieth, physicians across Europe fulfilled public functions. Many doctors’ working lives were more civic than academic or corporative. Even medical practice, in many communities, belonged to the common good. Physicians’ supervision of health and their training in letters made them key figures of intersection among increasingly written interactions. Recent historiography of information, communication, and politics enables recognizing relations among doctors’ diverse activities. The multifunctional physician, in turn, reveals empirical rational practices that cut across administration, inspection, resource evaluation and allocation, jurisprudence, natural history, humanist scholarship, diplomacy, publishing, learned communities, inquiry into bodies and environments, and the healing art. Practices of observing, documenting, evaluating, and translating grew around communal wellbeing rather than primarily production, exchange, and domination. This holds especially for plural Europe: the decentralized Italian, German, Dutch, and Swiss spheres in which cities were often sovereign and doctors held civic office. Against sweeping occupational differentiation, the civic physician grew in functions; short oaths in 1500 swelled to thousand-page handbooks by 1900. Periodizations positing transformation around 1800 are not substantiated. Nor is modernity by medicalization, scientization, differentiation, or the rise of experts. Knowing developed in a longue durée of community.
