Medicine and the Body in Early Modern Europe

Michael Stolberg is Senior Professor at the University of Würzburg, in Germany. Originally trained as a physician, he began working as an Assistant Professor at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Medical Sociology in Munich in 1989 and, in 1994, received a PhD in history and philosophy at the University of Munich. Over the following years, he worked as a Research Fellow in Venice, Cambridge (UK), and Munich, and in 2004 was awarded the Chair of History of Medicine in Würzburg. He has published widely on learned medical theory and practice, the patient experience, and body history in early modern Europe. Among his books are Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe (2011), A History of Palliative Care, 1500-1970 (2017), and Early Modern Physicians and Everyday Medical Practice in the Renaissance (2021).

• 1. From 'Step Years' to 'Menopause': The Changing Notion of the 'Climacteric'.- 2. "Wrath, Women and Wine, Throw Our Bodies to the Swine": Affects and Illness in the Early Modern Period.- 3. Lukas Cranach’s Representations of Melancholia, and the Medicine of His Time.- 4. "My Aesculapian Oracle!": Patient Letters as a Source of a Cultural History of Illness Experience in the Eighteenth Century.- 5. Cura Palliativa: The Idea and Practice of Palliative Treatment in Pre-Modern Medicine, ca. 1500–1850.- 6. Forms and Strategies of Authorization in Early Modern Medicine.- 7. Between Identity-Formation and Self-Staging: Medical Self-Fashioning in the Early Modern Period.- 8. Forms and Functions of Medical Case Reports in the Early Modern Period, 1500–1800.- 9. Casuistic Medical Training in the Sixteenth Century: The Paduan Collegia.- 10. The Concept of Innate Heat in Avicenna’s Canon Medicinae.- 11. In Awe of Creation: Daniel Sennert’s Conception of Total Substance, Innate Heat, and Spontaneous Generation, and His Atomistic Theory of Form.