Abstract

This article uses medical textbooks and advice literature to analyze the persona of the physician in the early German Enlightenment. The article pursues three lines of argument. First, it uses medical textbooks to situate the physician in the context of early modern observational life, focusing in particular on epistemic virtues, techniques, and technologies for conducting and documenting observations. Second, it introduces the concept of epistemic advantage to analyze the ways in which medical advice literature – ranging from ideal accounts of the political physician to satirical portrayals of the Machiavellian physician – mediated strategies for using medical knowledge to shape people’s conceptions of disease as well as of the physician as a medical authority. Third, it launches the concept epistemic contestation to capture situations of distrust and dispute, in which the physician’s authority was challenged both by patients and by other medical practitioners. Such mediation of epistemic virtues, techniques, technologies, and strategies in medical textbooks and advice literature must be understood in relation to an emerging media landscape that fundamentally affected the conditions for cultivating and performing a medical persona. By adopting this comprehensive approach to medical personhood, the article appeals to readers interested in early modern and Enlightenment medicine as well as those concerned with the broader intersections of medical persona, authority, power, and knowledge.