Dedicated to the history of early modern medicine, this book examines the establishment of the college of physicians in Nuremberg in the late sixteenth century. As reflected by the petition for medical reform by the German physician Joachim Camerarius in 1571, the physicians of Nuremberg aspired to legitimize their status and regulate the exercise of medicine in legal terms. Such a claim was made in the context of the emergence of municipal physicians (Stadtärzte) and the institutional project of medical reform in the cities of the Holy Roman Empire. In Nuremberg, this initiative led to the creation of the Collegium medicum (1592) as a professional and political body. The physicians of the city obtained the privilege of medical practice, hence excluding other types of practitioners, such as apothecaries, surgeons, and midwives, from therapeutic intervention. The resulting “order of medicine” aimed to prevent malpractice and to provide official advice on public health and “new”—often Paracelsian—drugs. The book explores the background of this reform, when medical advice and practice were still the fruit of a broad collaboration between diverse categories of practitioners from across social ranks.

By looking at the protagonists advocating for medical reform—university-trained physicians as opposed to other types of practitioners—Hannah Murphy analyzes the longstanding connection between learned and artisanal knowledge in the medical milieu. The interactions among theory, observation, and experiment in early modern medicine are examined under the scope of the complex relationship between Renaissance Galenism and empiricism. In so doing, the book goes beyond a mere institutional history of medical reform in Nuremberg to describe its formation from the perspective of Renaissance intellectual and material culture. Such contextualization is delineated in six chapters that survey diverse medical fields including pharmacology, therapeutics, and anatomy, as well as scholarly and textual practices such as bibliophilia and epistolary exchange. In considering these facets, the book shows how learned physicians appropriated craft and empirical knowledge within their theoretical training based on ancient texts.

Drawing a parallel between medical and civic appeals for prescription, expertise, and collegiality, Murphy argues that the reformation of medicine at Nuremberg was a political and social phenomenon embedded in textual and print culture. Her study opens with the publication of the first German pharmacopoeia, the Dispensatorium (1546), by Valerius Cordus (1515–1544). In addition to its philosophical content in botany and medicine, the treatise had a prescriptive impact on the codification and regulation of pharmacy in German cities. In chapter 2, Murphy looks into the role of medical practice and expertise in the civic sphere in the case of Heinrich Wolff (1520–1581), whose path exemplifies the career of a municipal physician through political and matrimonial alliances. Wolff's collection of Paracelsian manuscripts also points to the critical readership of Bodenstein's and Toxites's editions during the construction of the Paracelsian corpus—an important step for the rise of new alchemical interpretations of pharmacology. Murphy then considers the anatomical works of Volcher Coiter (1534–1576) and how they were supported by surgical observations following a methodology based on case studies and private dissections.

Chapter 4 explores book collecting and annotating in the medical and alchemical library of Georg Palma (1543–1591), whose collection ranging from ancient authors to sixteenth-century novatores—including Paracelsian prints—is a window on the humanist culture of late Renaissance medicine. The last case studied is Joachim Camerarius (1534–1598) and his works on botany and materia medica in relation to his epistolary collaboration with his colleagues. His network comprised medical actors of various social positions who served at municipal, court, and university levels, for example, Carolus Clusius, Johannes Crato, and Leonhart Fuchs, among others. In light of the previous chapters, the final part expounds the circumstances of medical reform from two standpoints: the official ordinances as part of a textually mediated medical culture and the struggle between physicians and apothecaries for civic authority. Murphy concludes with an epilogue on the posterity of Nuremberg's physicians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for which she provides a stimulating critical view on the historiographical narratives on the decline of Galenism.

Overall, the book offers an engaging and comprehensive insight into the various methods and practices of the medical milieu of the Holy Roman Empire, while addressing the civic consequences of its professional and intellectual activities. It is particularly original in exploring a period, a place, and a range of historical actors that have been little studied in the history of early modern medicine but played an important role in the medical Republic of Letters. Moreover, the status of the municipal physician is a fascinating subject that has been overlooked by historians in favor of court and university physicians.

However, a few aspects of the book raise questions. First, Paracelsus's troubled stay in and relationship with the city of Nuremberg in 1529–1530 would have been an interesting point to mention concerning the reception of Paracelsian medicine from a civic and medical point of view. Second, despite its emphasis on the eclectic nature of Galenic medicine, the book at times has an ambiguous position on “the advent of the Scientific Revolution” (14) and the “new turn toward empiricism” (19). This is reflected, here and there, by the evocation of some “medical ‘progress’” (146), “conservative” Galenism (175, 186), as well as Paracelsian and Galenic “mystical tendencies” (112). Whereas this scattered scientific-revolution terminology contrasts with the general tone of the book, it may explain why Georg Palma's erudite library is described as a “collection of items without great novelty” (119). Setting aside these few remarks, the book makes a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of late Renaissance medicine.