Essays in the history of medicine / by Karl Sudhoff ; translated by various hands and edited, with foreword and biographical sketch, by Fielding H. Garrison.

  • Sudhoff, Karl, 1853-1938. Skizzen. English
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Essays in the history of medicine / by Karl Sudhoff ; translated by various hands and edited, with foreword and biographical sketch, by Fielding H. Garrison. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    celebration of the foundation of the University of Leipzig he prepared a “History of the Leipzig Medical Faculty in the Earlier Period” (1909). The publication of these five mas¬ sive monographs in rapid succession, together with the issue of the first number of his Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin (1:907), confirmed Sudhoff s already established position as the first of living medical historians. Research work of such highly original character and path-breaking intention had not been seen since the publication of Haeser’s third volume on the history of epidemic diseases, but it had been earlier recog¬ nized among the cognoscenti that a new star had arisen in the medical firmament, and the Leipzig Institute soon came to be regarded as the center of medico-historical investigation. The next problems which Sudhoff attacked were the epidemiologv and public hygiene of the Middle Ages, in particular the his¬ tory of syphilis prior to 1495, and the sanitary measures taken by the mediaeval peoples against leprosy, plague and syphilis. As building stones for this important phase of the history of public hygiene, he published in his Archiv a vast number of hitherto unprinted hygienic ordinances of the mediaeval towns and other manuscript material bearing upon the history of these diseases, made exhaustive studies of the enormous litera¬ ture of the pest tracts, of the leprosy protocols, of the manu¬ scripts and printed material showing the existence of syphilis in Europe before 1495, of the prehistory of the Regimen Sani- tatis and of the whole body of Salernitan medical literature. These labors, which were in progress at the outbreak of the European War, were interrupted in 1911 by the Dresden Hy¬ gienic Exposition, for which Professor Sudhoff and Dr. Neu- stätter, with the assistance of other colleagues, were called upon to prepare the exhibit of the Historical Section. Here Sudhoff s previous experience with the two Lower Rhine ex¬ positions of 1898-1899 served him in good stead, and the result further justified his now well established reputation.
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