In Germany's historic town and city centres, hospital buildings, infirmaries and streets named after bathers and barbers still remind us today of the health care provided in medieval and early modern times. However, none of the places mentioned owes its existence to the doctors of that time. As Hannah Murphy reminds us, learned physicians in the sixteenth century represented a new population group slowly emerging from the numerous territorial university foundations. The places in the urban fabric where their activities manifested themselves were private ones: their study rooms, their gardens and the houses where they visited their patients. To English readers, this volume is a fine introduction to the whole variety of scientific practices and social and political rituals of early modern physicians in Germany. The author has rightly chosen Nuremberg as a case-study: its complex urban structure enables her to present all the common patterns of behaviour using the example of prominent local residents.

Murphy describes how the authorities of German cities began to define rules and standards for public life and trade in the second half of the sixteenth century. They tried to identify groups of experts within the urban population who could provide a well-founded ‘second opinion' on problems that arose. As Murphy argues, it was exactly this constellation of the city councils' need for reliable order on one side and the scientific practices of the doctors on the other that led to the ‘rise of physicians'. Although in some places the author does not elaborate enough on the actual connection between these two points, her thesis is convincing. It is a pity, however, that with such an enthusiastic approach, and extensive use of manuscripts, the rendering of almost every Latin and German word is orthographically or grammatically incorrect.

The book is divided into a total of six chapters which end with an outlook on the later reception of the Nuremberg medical ordinance from 1592. The author uses the example of prominent Nuremberg physicians (e.g. Heinrich Wolff, Joachim Camerarius the Younger, Georg Palma) to introduce a scientific or social activity of the doctors in more detail in each of the chapters. The strongest chapters of the book are chapters 1 and 6, which form a unified argument. In chapter 1, the reader gets to know Valerius Cordus, a young doctor who compiled a structured catalogue of medical prescriptions, the so-called Dispensatorium. It became the legally binding standard for Nuremberg pharmacies in the 1540s. The remarkable thing is that Cordus neither wrote this catalogue initially for the city of Nuremberg (but for his uncle who was a pharmacist in Berne), nor had the city of Nuremberg ever commissioned a physician to prepare such a catalogue. Hannah Murphy uses this apt example to show how the city authorities became aware of the doctors' abilities to write such codifying texts. She also makes it clear that the doctors, who were very attentive to professional politics, began to recognize the city's need for such texts. As we learn in chapter 6, in the revised edition of Cordus' Dispensatorium of 1592, the physicians of the newly founded Collegium Medicum appear as authors on the title page: they managed to prevail in the conflict of competence with the pharmacists.

Two points that are important for the history of urban health care in early modern Germany must be made. First, one must be aware that in contrast to all other German cities in Nuremberg every doctor practising in the city had to take an oath as a ‘Stadtarzt', whether he was paid or unpaid (so it is not ‘puzzling', as Murphy puts it, that George Palma did not receive a salary). Secondly, doctors in German towns and cities were not allowed to perform surgery. Surgeons usually did all cutting because it was the sole prerogative of their guild. Volcher Coiter (chapter 2) is therefore highly interesting, but not a representative example. It was not usually the physicians, but surgeons who had already been examined by municipal guild regulations, who then studied medicine and, from the seventeenth century onwards, began to establish a connection between academic knowledge (anatomy) and practice (treatment).

For mutual enrichment, I advise Murphy's book to be read together with the newly published volume by Andrew Mendelsohn, Annemarie Kinzelbach and Ruth Schilling.Footnote ² The fact that two comprehensive studies on health care in the early modern city appeared within such a short interval shows the potential for further research in this area.