The alchemical world of the German court: occult philosophy and chemical medicine in the circle of Moritz of Hessen (1572–1632)

For patients in the 1920s, diagnosis and therapeutic tools rather than social position were now determining hospital admission. The hospital was becoming a complex operation, no longer seen as adequately supervised by absentee lay trustees, but only by professionalizing superintendents. To some critics, hospitals were beginning to appear as monolithic and impersonal medical factories. But though cash transactions had now replaced benevolence, Rosenberg qualifies the marketplace metaphor. Physicians were still paid in prestige and clinical access, trustees in deference and acknowledgement of status, nurses and other workers in security. Patients did not simply buy a commodity. Third-party payment, government involvement, technological change and economic growth provided a further stimulus to the growth of hospitals, but still did not provide a simple market model. Rosenberg claims that, as with defence spending, those advocating expenditure on hospitals promoted not only self-interest but shared social assumptions about security, in this case to be achieved through scientific medicine with its healing promises. Rosenberg draws from his immense historical knowledge-not simply the history of American medicine-to interpret a wealth of material from various types of hospitals, as well as from diaries, letters and other primary sources. He selects examples and quotations with consummate skill, and, with great insight, presents a coherent account of the rise of the hospital system, giving us on the way a cogent account of the history of modern medicine itself which is beautifully written and accessible to a wider public. His work has for some years served as a model for many of us. If you read The care of strangers, you will see why. For a radically Protestant prince in the unstable Germany of the Counter-Reformation, scientific patronage had a special significance. The Landgrave Moritz of Hesse-Cassel inherited a Lutheran principality and a dispute with his Darmstadt cousins over the administration of the University of Marburg. His hopes of a northern European Protestant alliance and his attempts to interfere with Lutheran ceremonial in Marburg were frustrated, but the promotion of alchemical endeavour at the Cassel court served to compensate for such impotence by beckoning to an arcane world of possibility. It was, as Bruce Moran claims in a study of Moritz's court that inevitably recalls R. J. W. Evans's Rudolf II and his world, a "patronage of despair". The political strategy involved in developing a court identity associated with hermetic philosophy included the infiltration of the University of Marburg by …