Medical misinformation in early modern Germany Christopher Hutchinson

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hutchinson, Christopher (Professor of German), author.

Series:

Early modern exchange

The early modern exchange

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medical misconceptions--Germany--History.

Medical misconceptions.

Communication in medicine--Germany--History.

Communication in medicine.

Communicable diseases--Germany--History.

Communicable diseases.

Medicine--Germany--History--16th century.

Medicine.

Medicine--Germany--History--17th century.

Medicine--Germany--History--18th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Newark University of Delaware Press [2026]

Summary:

"Medical Misinformation in Early Modern Germany examines how doctors, writers, and printers in sixteenth-century Germany responded to the rapid expansion of print and its implications for medical knowledge. The spread of printed texts generated widespread suspicion about print’s reliability as a conduit of information and led writers to reflect on questions of audience, vernacularity, and medical authority in their responses to disease. The book investigates literary texts alongside popular vernacular medical pamphlets on the major epidemic diseases of the period––plague, syphilis, and the English sweating sickness––to reveal a widespread concern with the impact of printed texts on public health. During the 1529 outbreak of the English sweating sickness, this concern culminated in writers’ use of a “rhetoric of virality,” explicitly comparing the circulation of texts to the spread of disease, as they confronted the parallel contagions of disease and information"-- De Gruyter Brill

Contents:

Introduction : Pathologies of information in early modern Germany

Plague for a popular audience : Suspicions of print in late fifteenth-century Germany

The French disease and the guaiac cure : Medical authority in Hutten and Paracelsus

The English sweating sickness and the rhetoric of virality

The apparatus of virality : The sweating cure and the Reformation

Printing quackery

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index

Online resource; title from PDF title page (De Gruyter Brill, viewed September 3, 2026)

Other Format:

Print version Hutchinson, Christopher (Professor of German) Medical misinformation in early modern Germany

ISBN:

9781644534304

1644534304

OCLC:

1603669507

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license