Medical Misinformation in Early Modern Germany

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.

Christopher Hutchinson is an assistant professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Mississippi. His research interests include book history, the history of disease, and the popularization of scientific discourses in literature. He has published articles in The German Quarterly and Seminar.

Acknowledgements Note on Sources Introduction: Pathologies of Information in Early Modern Germany Chapter One: Plague for a Popular Audience: Suspicions of Print in Late Fifteenth-Century Germany Chapter Two: The French Disease and the Guaiac Cure: Medical Authority in Hutten and Paracelsus Chapter Three: The English Sweating Sickness and the Rhetoric of Virality Chapter Four: The Apparatus of Virality: The Sweating Cure and the Reformation Chapter Five: Printing Quackery Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index