Vor und nach Paracelsus. Untersuchungen über Hohenheims Traditionsverbundenheit und Nachrichten über seine Anhânger

mission which consisted of four Knights Grand Cross and two Knights, who worked through the chief physician-'princeps medicorum'-who was appointed by the Grandmaster for life. When the era of the Knights ended with their surrender to General Bonaparte there was a short interregnum until the British took over government and re-established the Infirmary as a Military hospital. It was largely destroyed by the air-raids of the last war. Medical education started in Malta with the establishment in the seventeenth century of a School of Anatomy by Grandmaster Nicholas Cottoner at his own expense. This developed into a Faculty of Medicine when the Royal University was founded in 1771, its Statutes being based upon those of Bologna. The French abolished it, but it was rapidly re-founded by the first English Governor in 1800, and has flourished since. Scientific medicine in Malta finds its highlights in the identification of the course of Brucellosis ('Malta Fever'), by Sir David Bruce in 1886, and in the discovery by Professor Sir Themostocles Zammit, in 1905, that the goat is the reservoir of the micrococcus causative of this disease. The latter also introduced the modern agglutination tests for this group of diseases, basing his technique upon that previously described by Widal for the diagnosis of typhoid fever. There are full descriptions of the present-day medical, social and administrative institutions and services which bear upon the public health of this colourful little island. All this and much more is told very readably, in detail. This must be the definitive work on the Medical History of Malta. Before and after Paracelsus; his debt to tradition and new material on the Paracelsists is the title of the present volume in which seventeen papers published between 1941 and 1964 have been reprinted. Some of these are difficult of access and all contain new and important manuscript material, mostly from the period immediately preceding Paracelsus and from the personal collections of the author. Dr. Eis is Professor of Germanic Philology in the University of Heidelberg and has to his credit substantial contributions to the history of medicine, especially on late medieval tradition. Paracelsus is in many respects not as original as generally believed; he was anticipated by less well known, but quite important, medieval naturalists whose achievements can only be evaluated from manuscripts here published for the first time. This is the keynote of the present book. It is well proven …