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SUMMARY: This article reconstructs the diagnostic act of the French pox in the French-disease hospital of sixteenth-century Augsburg. It focuses on how the participants in the clinical encounter imagined the configuration of the pox and its localization in the human body. Of central importance for answering this question is the early modern conception of physical signs. It has been argued that it was due to a specific understanding of bodily signs and their relationship to a disease and its causes, that disease definition and classification in the early modern period showed a high degree of flexibility and fluidity. This paper looks at how the sixteenth-century theoretical conception of physical signs not only shaped the diagnosis and treatment of the pox but also reflected the overall organization of institutions.
KEYWORDS: French pox, Augsburg, medical semiotics, diagnosis, hospital
In December 1618 Philip Ess, a day laborer, presented himself at the municipal French-disease or pox hospital (Blatterhaus) in Augsburg.1 The town council had founded the institution in 1495, the very year the pox made its first appearance in the city.2 Since the mid-sixteenth century a biconfessional hospital, the Blatterhaus was one of the many municipal and private health-care institutions aiming to bring relief to Augsburg's Protestant and Catholic poor. With a maximum capacity of sixty to seventy patients, it was an important pillar of the city's poor-relief system.3
Interestingly, during the course of the sixteenth century the impecuniousness of applicants became decreasingly important to the Blatterhaus's administrators; instead, starting in the 1530s, it was the sufferer's physical condition that determined admission. This trend, detectable in hospital records and admissions rules, is very similar to what Colin Jones has argued for early modern French hospitals4-and in Augsburg, as in many French cities, it went hand in hand with the specialization of all of the city's healthcare institutions. By the mid-sixteenth century a physical examination (Geschau)-usually conducted by a barber-surgeon and a university-trained physician, and in the presence of the administrator, the caretaker, and other lay witnesses-decided whether the applicant's physical state met the specific requirements of the institution to which admission was sought.5
Philip Ess turned out to be a rather controversial case for the appointed medical experts of the pox hospital. After examining his naked body...