ABSTRACT
67Besides a few outstanding “Renaissance men” like Girolamo Cardano, historians have tended to study early modern physicians almost exclusively as medical men, as members of the medical profession. Most less-well-known early modern physicians did in fact make their living by treating patients. However, as this paper argues, their self-fashioning, their social standing, and even their careers as medical practitioners also depended on and reflected to a considerable degree their mastery of a wide range of non-medical, scholarly skills. We thus risk arriving at an overly narrow picture if we apply modern notions of professional identity to studying the lives and works of early modern physicians and treat their other, broadly “humanist”, interests and activities as merely preliminary or accessory. Drawing on a rare source, an extensive collection of notebooks kept by the Bohemian physician Georg Handsch starting from the late 1540s when he was still a student, this chapter surveys the various ways in which a fairly ordinary learned physician applied his humanist learning—from poetry and letter writing to collections of commonplaces and notes on popular notions and practices—as a means of fashioning himself as a member of a local intellectual elite and finding and securing his place in urban society.
