Crafting Medicine

“Hieronymus Brunschwig pioneered vernacular how-to books about surgery and distillation—two key sites of innovation in early modern European medicine—but until now we’ve lacked up-to-date scholarship about him. Taape’s book gives us a dynamic and inventive Brunschwig, situated in the culture of artisanal Strasbourg, garnering authority from experience and the use of his senses, while staking a claim to better social status for surgeons.” – Mary Fissell, author of “Pushback: The 2,500-Year Fight to Thwart Women by Restricting Abortion”“In this compelling, in-depth account of artisan-author Hieronymus Brunschwig, Taape tells a remarkable story of healing knowledge that emerged from a crucial intersection of hands-on craft experience and writing in the lively milieu of innovative printers, artisans, and humanists during Strasbourg’s first era of print. Taape paints a vivid picture of Brunschwig’s striving in his surgical and distillation books to provide a virtual apprenticeship in the use of the senses and the hands for vernacular readers of his city. Translated into Dutch and English, Brunschwig’s techniques, his tools, and his material imaginary, derived from distilling knowledge, went on to influence and raise the status of generations of practitioners.” – Pamela H. Smith, author of “From Lived Experience to the Written Word: Reconstructing Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern World”“Excellent. Right from the start, Crafting Medicine grips the reader with its clarity of technical focus. It is highly specific in the best possible way, drawing on a deep engagement with a single writer to produce a novel and imaginative book.” – Hannah Murphy, author of “A New Order of Medicine: The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg”

Tillmann Taape is a researcher at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.