ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on physicians, their education and their possible career paths. It looks at the various stages in their medical life, from becoming a student to obtaining a permanent position as a local doctor or something more prestigious, culminating in an appointment as personal physician to a nobleman or even a monarch. The physicians were only one group among many offering healing, and their fees and their pretensions may have often induced patients to look elsewhere for assistance. Physicians’ accounts and reminiscences of their student travels (surgeons are less informative) often emphasise how what they studied or discovered in the wanderings determined or deepened their medical interests. Even after death, tombstone inscriptions and printed funeral sermons continued to promote the virtues, academic, familiar and collegiate, of the physician as he and his relations saw them.
