Narrations and Context: Six Exhibitions
1 -- Conditions of Difference: Scholarly Migration and Medical Book Production in the 17th Century
17th century medical science around the globe thrived on the lively exchange of information and material between centers of higher learning, such as in Europe universities and academies. Key players were not only the teaching professors of medicine themselves but students, physicians, non-affiliated scholars and sometimes missionaries who migrated from place to place and carried memorized topic lists for disputes, transcriptions of lectures and printed books for reference, and letters of introduction. They also brought, distributed, and changed miscellaneous bits of know-how: how to categorize and structure their field of knowledge, how to dissect bodies, to arrange an experiment, and to mix potions and medications. In the history of science, we want to know about the impact that the scholars' regional or imported cultures of learning had on the processes of developing and distributing information for public usage in medicine, such as entries in encyclopedias and other reference books,…
Students learned in a group or place that Sennert called his "Collegium Chymicum". What did they do there, what did they take away?
New findings of Chemical Equipment from the 16th and early 17th century point to the existance of a large laboratory facility for alchemical experiments in Wittenberg: a former Franciscan monastery church, secularized during the Reformation. Archaeologists found recently glass pieces in this church. Putting them together they were surprised: Not medieval glass windows but chemical phioles came out as results of their work of collecting and restoring the fragments.
3 -- Getting to know Sennert's Students
This exhibit introduces Daniel Sennert's respondents. All of them studied with Sennert, but the major part of them also with other professors, and we have evidence in the form of disputations, what materials they prepared for their exams.
4 -- Sennert's Natural History and other Digests: Disputations to Edited Volumes
In 1600, Sennert published a book that is today only once available, his Epitome Naturalis Scientiae. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris holds this one copy. The book contains an introductory dedication with the announcement of 26 disputations, but no table of contents. Twentysix independent pamphlet publications of around 10 pages each follow: these are disputations, defended by Sennert's students at the University of Wittenberg, continuously every week in the academic year 1599/1600.
The pamphlet publications that were sent out and distributed for the oral defense or response were already consecutively numbered, and the last publication was marked as such: "26 et ultima", "twenty-sixth and last". These 26 disputations formed the corpus of the chapters of this book. Both the pamphlets and the later opening credits were printed by the Wittenberg printer Gronenberg. We do not know how many times the entire publication was printed, as there are no other copies of this book.
5 -- Families, Dedicatees and Printers: Networking outside the University
Information travels. Carefully widening the circles of personal connections, we find our students take part in family gatherings, and marry into even more wide-spread family ties. In the dedications of their disputations they often praised friends, tutorial promoters, but also aquainted political figures in courts and city governments. We find them already as students collaborate on Festschriften for compatriots at academia. Their personal connections brought them friends and enemies, stability and security, but also challenge and sometimes death. What is the relevance of these networks for the making of medical information?
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. ...
Tags: Disputations, Epitome Naturalis Scientiae, Making of Encyclopedias, Making of Treatises
Keywords: Colleges, Universities, Health, Medicine, History, Sennert, Information, Knowledge, Baltic, Wittenberg, Education, Studies, Disputation, Dissertation