Centres of medical excellence
Subtitle: medical travel and education in Europe, 1500-1789
By: [edited by] Ole Peter Grell, Andrew Cunningham and Jon Arrizabalaga.
Contributors: Grell, Ole Peter.; Cunningham, Andrew, Dr.; Arrizabalaga, Jon.
Series: The history of medicine in context; History of medicine in context
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT
Language: eng
Number of pages: 335
ISBN-13: 9780754666998
Subjects: Medical education -- Europe -- History; Education, Medical -- history -- Europe; History, 16th Century -- Europe; History, 17th Century -- Europe; History, 18th Century -- Europe
Description: Students notoriously vote with their feet, seeking out the best and most innovative teachers of their subject. The most ambitious students have been travelling long distances for their education since universities were first founded in the thirteenth century, making their own educational pilgrimage or peregrinatio.

This volume deals with the peregrinatio medica from the viewpoint of the travelling students: who went where; how did they travel; what did they find when they arrived; what did they take back with them from their studies. Even a single individual could transform medical studies or practice back home on the periphery by trying to reform teaching and practice the way they had seen it at the best universities. Other contributions look at the universities themselves and how they were actively developed to attract students, and at some of the most successful teachers, such as Boerhaave at Leiden or the Monros at Edinburgh.

The essays show how increasing levels of wealth allowed more and more students to make their pilgrimages, travelling for weeks at a time to sit at the feet of a particular master. In medicine this meant that, over the period c.1500 to 1789, a succession of universities became the medical school of choice for ambitious students: Padua and Bologna in the 1500s, Paris, Leiden and Montpellier in the 1600s, and Leiden, Gottingen and Edinburgh in the 1700s. The arrival of foreign students brought wealth to the university towns and this significant economic benefit meant that the governors of these universities tried to ensure the defence of freedom of religion and freedom of speech, thus providing the best conditions for the promotion of new views and innovation in medicine.

The collection presents a new take on the history of medical education, as well as universities, travel and education more widely in ancien regime Europe. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includex index.
Table of contents: title: The Bartholins, the Platters, and Laurentius Gryllus : the peregrinatio medica in the 16th and 17th centuries / Andrew Cunningham; title: Medical education and centres of excellence in eighteenth-century Europe : towards an identification / Laurence Brockliss; title: The mobility of medical students from the fifteenth till the eighteenth century : the institutional context / Hilde Ridder-Symoens; title: Spanish medical students' peregrinatio to Italian universities in the Renaissance / Jon Arrizabalaga; title: On Portuguese medical students and masters traveling abroad : an overview from the early modern period to the enlightenment / Mário Sérgio Farelo; title: Pieter van Foreest and the acquisition and travelling of medical knowledge in the sixteenth century / Catrien Santing; title: "Like the bees, who neither suck nor generate their honey from one flower" : the significance of the peregrinatio academica for Danish medical students in the late 16th and early 17th century / Ole P. Grell; title: Medical education in Padua : students, faculty, and facilities / Cynthia Klestinec; title: Paris : certainly the best place for learning the practical part of anatomy and surgery / Toby Gelfand; title: Medical education in eighteenth-century Montpellier / Elizabeth A. Williams; title: Herman Boerhaave at Leiden : Communis Europae praeceptor / Rina Knoeff; title: Science, practice, and reputation : the university of Göttingen and its medical faculty in the 18th century / Hubert Steinke; title: The importance of being Edinburgh : the rise and fall of the Edinburgh medical school in the 18th century / Helen Dingwal.