6 -- A History of Information: Practicing, Teaching, and Writing Medicine at University, in Courts, Hospitals and Towns

Information, seen as an analytic term in the field of historical research, can be used in at least three different ways when applied to early modern history.

First, it enables us to trace how scholarly knowledge intertwined with daily practices and everyman's reasoning, traveling back and forth between institutions of learning, the world of printing, single households, and the state administrative apparatus.

Second, the flow of information can't be understood without discussing its means of circulation. Word of mouth, the printing press, or networks of letters are but a few of different ways information traveled. Information traveled along international merchants'  and pilgrims' routes, such as the silk road, the Baltic Hanse trade route and the way of St James, carved in the middle ages, as well as via middle and long-haul postal services or individual journeys.

And third, we observe archives and administrations developing professional methods of control, examination, and storage, led by the state, individual institutions or private initiatives.

Against this backdrop, Sennert's students can be identified as instrumental in spreading and circulating a specific line-up of knowledge and skills that define their medical practice in Central Europe and beyond. In their work in courts, in hospitals, and with private patients, they were go-betweens linking university learning to medical practices affecting everyday life.

Further reading on information history: Information: A Historical Companion, ed. by Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Goeing, & Anthony Grafton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021.