Making Physicians: Tradition, Teaching, and Trials at Leiden University, 1575-1639

How did medical students become Galenic physicians in the early modern era? Making Physicians guides the reader through the ancient sources, textbooks, lecture halls, gardens, dissecting rooms, and patient bedsides in the early decades of an important medical school. Standard pedagogy combined book learning and hands-on experience. Professors and students embraced Galen’s models for integrating reason and experience, and cultivated humanist scholarship and argumentation, which shaped their study of chymistry, medical botany, and clinical practice at patients’ bedsides, in private homes and in the city hospital. Following Galen’s emphasis on finding and treating the sick parts, professors correlated symptoms and the evidence from post-mortems to produce new pathological knowledge.