The author of this book takes as her starting point that, in two major respects, medicine and the medical profession were in a precarious position in Germany in the period under consideration. Within the German university, medicine was usually the smallest among the three higher faculties—the one with the least funding and resources, the fewest professors, and the fewest students. Moreover, medicine's academic status as a scientia, rather than an ars mechanica, was strongly contested, especially by members of the law faculty, who claimed a position of academic superiority. Second, the situation of the medical profession on the health market was difficult. Based on their learning and doctoral titles, physicians saw their natural place on top of all the other medical practitioners, the numerous barber-surgeons and unlicensed healers. Many patients, rich and poor, put their trust in these less learned healers, however, and were not easily convinced that the medicine of the learned physician was preferable and superior. Schütte links these two areas of conflict and challenge, tracing, first for the academic context and then for the health market, the various strategies that medical practitioners utilized to assert their status and authority. She does so with a focus on Vienna, Cologne, and Leipzig, three places characterized by very different political and religious environments, but each with a medical faculty that strove to take control of the local medical health market. Among other topics, she looks at the ways in which public anatomies were used to promote the status of learned physicians, at conflicts between members of the faculties of law and medicine over the right of precedence in public ceremonies, and at the development of faculty statutes. In a parallel move, she examines the ways in which learned physicians and medical faculties sought to come to terms with other, non-academic actors on the health market—in particular, with unlicensed healers, pharmacists, and Jewish practitioners. All in all, she draws a rich and nuanced picture of a profession that was struggling and fighting—in many respects quite successfully, in the long run, at least—to assert its status and its place within the world of learning as well as in urban society and the health market at large.

This is, with minor revisions only, a PhD thesis, which Schütte successfully defended in Göttingen a couple of years ago. It was conceived within the framework of a postgraduate study program that focused on “cultures of expertise” from the twelfth to the sixteenth century and clearly was inspired and enriched by this context. As is typical and befitting for a PhD thesis, certainly in the German tradition, it presents, on almost five hundred pages, an impressive wealth of research literature on many aspects of the history of the late medieval faculty and the medical profession in this period, as well as on theoretical issues like the nature of expertise and professional self-representation in general. This comes at a certain price, however. Schütte's own results sometimes risk being buried in her summaries and discussions of the work of others. Readers who are primarily interested in original research are likely to wish, at times, that the author had had the courage to undertake some very serious cutting when turning her thesis into a book and to focus more on her own analysis of primary sources—such as faculty proceedings, which prove very enlightening, especially for Vienna. With that said, however, Schütte's extensive presentation and discussion of the state of the art will be of great service to those readers looking for a competent and up-to-date survey, especially of the rich German-language historical scholarship on the topics she approaches in her book.