This study focuses on health, healing , and medicine in 17th and 18th Germany and will address four interrelated topics: 1) the role of government in formulating and executing health policies, 2) programs of medical enlightenment and popular medical enlightenment, 3) the role of medicine and healers (both popular and orthodox) in an early modern environment, and 4) ordinary persons' perceptions about the body, illness, and health. This study simultaneously addresses concerns in the history of medicine, in social history, and, especially, in the history of mentalities and attitudes. Historians have recently been exploring mentalities in past times in great depth, here, for example, in regard to vioews on health, medicine, and medical care. It appears that the area and period under consideration (northern Germany, 1648-1820) fit into a critical transition phase between the pre-modern and modern worlds and mentalities (i.e. ways of perceiving and interpreting one's physical and mental surroundings). This study should help elucidate how the shift from one world-view to another took place. This focus on mentalities, however, is locked into a precise description and analysis of the directions health policies and medicine were taking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ith should be stressed, however, that although these sorts of institutional and intellectual frameworks are critically important to this study, they are not its focus. Specifically, it will be argued that the state's policy of rationalizing medical practice in this period was only imperfectly realized and indeed, and perhaps more importantly,lk was far less rigidly formulated than has generally been assumed. Second, it will be maintained that the program of popular medical enlightenment pursued ultimately had little impact on entrenched popular attitudes toward health and healing practices and little impact on entrenched popular attitude toward health and healing practices and little effect on the medical mentalities that informed them. Third, this investigation will examine and map out a series of pre-modern attitudes toward health and healing and suggest ways in which these attitudes changed. Finally, it will be argued that the basis for medical decision making did not rest on purely medical criteria, but was found in a web of social, economic, and political considrerations.
