The first-ever volume to offer a broader European narrative on surgical training and education in the early modern era. 

This volume brings together case studies from the French, Italian, German, and English contexts to reveal diverse modes of surgical teaching and learning that were shaped by local contexts in early modern towns and cities. The chapters reveal the many spaces where practitioners learned and experienced surgery, shedding new light on the practice of early modern surgery.

Maria Pia Donato is the Centre national de la recherche scientifique Research Professor of History at the Institut d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine in Paris. She is the author of Sudden Death: Medicine and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Rome and Medicine and the Inquisition in the Early Modern World. Elaine Leong is associate professor of history at University College London. She is the author of Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England and the editor of a number of essay volumes and journal special issues. Tillmann Taape is a research fellow and lecturer in the history of medicine at the Charité Medical School in Berlin. He is the author of Crafting Medicine.

List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: Learning to cut and cutting to learn
Maria Pia Donato, Elaine Leong, and Tillmann Taape

Part I: Diversity of knowledge and practice

2 Learning to cut for the stone: training specialised surgeons in the Holy Roman Empire
Annemarie Kinzelbach

3 Learning to dress wounds: seventeenth-century Italian surgeons and their pharmaceutical competence
Sandra Cavallo

4 Surgical training and practice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany
Michael Stolberg

5 Leonardo Fioravanti, a (more) learned surgeon: surgical techne and the critique of anatomy
Cynthia Klestinec

Part II: Genealogies of surgical education

6 Learning surgery from medieval manuscripts
Peter Jones

7 ‘The ordinary terms of chest wounds’ or how to become a forensic surgical expert in early modern France. Evidence from a seventeenth-century surgical corporation notebook
Cathy McClive

8 ‘Trained up & now made apt to practise’: vernacular print and surgical training in early modern London
Elaine Leong

9 ‘His body, his honour, his health, and his handwork’: surgical training in printed books and in the city of artisans
Tillmann Taape

Part III: Epistemic modes and strategies of training

10 Learning from disaster: surgical mishaps and pedagogy in the age of print
Heidi Hausse

11 Teaching with images: Guglielmo Riva’s surgical pedagogy in seventeenth-century Rome
Silvia De Renzi

12 Entangled sites of pedagogy: André Levret’s Parisian midwifery course
Scottie Hale Buehler

13 ‘Proficient in all things surgical’. Apprentices learning and doing in Italian hospitals, 1670–1770
Maria Pia Donato

Index