This project will examine the education, social status, and professional ideology of German physicians between 1750 and the 1820s. In the mid-1700s, physicians comprised one of the three traditional learned estates (Gelehrtenstande), whose status and privileges depended on their possession of university degrees. As members of a profession, physicians did not identify themselves primarily as healers. Instead, they saw themselves as men whose broad education in natural philosophy had secured for them a certain position in society and the right to enjoy the patronage of secular and ecclesiastical princes. Their university education correspondingly emphasized a broad mastery of medical theory and the principles Of its application to specific cases, and ignored preparation for bedside practice. By 1800, this formerly unified identity had splintered into two deeply antagonistic visions. Some physicians abandoned the values of broad erudition in favor of more utilitarian claims for medicine, a movement prompted by the spread of Enlightenment ideology in Central Europe after the mid-18th century. One mark of this new orientation was the establishment of teaching clinics at nearly a dozen universities. Meanwhile, others emphasized medicine's role in the unified pursuit of knowledge about the world. These physicians looked upon bedside practice with contempt and sought to make their way as professors in university medical faculties. Using the methods of the social construction of scientific knowledge, this project will examine the impulses behind these developments and explore their consequences for later German science and medicine. It is oriented around the following questions: (1) How did physicians see themselves as members of a profession, and how did that definition change over time? (2) How did changing doctrines of medical theory embody professional tensions? What resources lent scientific legitimacy to differing group's claims? (3) What accounts for the rapid spread of Brunonianism in Germany, which plunged the medical community into rancorous conflict for more than a decade? (4) Why did a new standard of scholarship - the """"""""research ethic"""""""" often pointed to by historians -- come into general acceptance in medicine and other academic sciences after 1800? Why did these new standards replace older ideas that linked scholarship with pedagogy? The resulting book should be able to address a broad audience of historians of medicine, science, and education.
