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Baum on Taape, 'Crafting Medicine: Artisans, Knowledge, and the Common Man in Hieronymus Brunschwig's Books on Surgery and Distillation' [Review]
Taape, Tillmann. Crafting Medicine: Artisans, Knowledge, and the Common Man in Hieronymus Brunschwig's Books on Surgery and Distillation. : University of Chicago Press, 2025. 332 pp. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 9780226840604.
Reviewed by
Jacob M. Baum (Texas Tech University)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (July, 2026)
Commissioned by
Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=62678
Since the early 2000s, one of the most important developments in the history of early modern science has been the growing recognition of contributions made by Europe's urban artisans. Of particular significance has been these artisans' embodied, practical approaches to the natural world, documented by scholars such as Pamela H. Smith and Pamela O. Long, among others. Tillmann Taape's new study of the writings of the Strasbourg surgeon Hieronymus Brunschwig (ca. 1450-ca. 1530) is an important contribution to this historiographic conversation. During his life, Brunschwig published several works in German on surgery, distillation, and medicinal remedies. These works went through multiple editions in the sixteenth century, including several translations into Low German, Dutch, and English, attesting to their popularity among vernacular audiences across Europe. Today, Brunschwig's name is well known among specialists working on sixteenth-century Germany and appears in passing in some treatments of medical history, but his writings have yet to receive the systematic analytical attention that other, louder and more controversial figures, such as Paracelsus (1493-1541) and Leonardo Fioravanti (1507-1588), have enjoyed. Crafting Medicine fills that gap by analyzing Brunschwig's written corpus as an artifact of the distinctive artisanal epistemology of the sixteenth century.
Because Brunschwig lived and worked at the beginning of this period, one important contribution of Taape's study is to push back the chronology somewhat. Usually, artisanal epistemology is depicted as originating in the later fifteenth century but only fully flourishing in the latter half of the sixteenth. Taape argues that, already in the later fifteenth century, Brunschwig was engaged in a project of establishing a new kind of medical authority based mainly on one's ability to control and manipulate the material of the body and substances in the natural world. Brunschwig arrived at this position through an eclectic combination of long-standing traditions of medical theory, emergent alchemical ideas, and the practical, sense-based skills cultivated by artisans in the process of learning and plying their trades. As such, the medical authority cultivated by Brunschwig was much more grounded in the quotidian concerns and experiences of the ordinary, unlearned urban populace than the formal learning of university-trained physicians. Additionally, Taape argues that Brunschwig's intended audience was a very wide cross-section of the vernacular readership, consisting not only of guild-trained surgeons or other medical practitioners but also the so-called common man more generally. Taape unfolds subcomponents of this argument over the course of ten chapters, elaborately organized into five distinctive thematic clusters. In the space permitted for this review, it is not possible to characterize adequately all the claims made in these chapters, so I offer only a summary of each part of the book, followed by more detailed considerations of some of its strengths and weaknesses.
Part 1, consisting of chapter 1, is a contextual chapter and focuses on how Brunschwig's project emerged at the intersection of artisanal and intellectual (mostly humanist) cultures in Strasbourg. The most decisive influence was the former, reflected in Brunschwig's insistence on medicine as a form of craft knowledge. Part 2 of the book, comprising chapters 2 and 3, develops several thematic points relating to how surgeons like Brunschwig utilized the new medium of print to bolster their expertise and honor as medical practitioners.
Parts 3 and 4 represent the argumentative core of the book and contain its most successful chapters. Part 3 takes up the topic of distillation, about which Brunschwig wrote in two of his most important works, the Small (1500) and Large (1512) books of distillation. The main idea of part 3, articulated in chapters 4 and 5, is that the technical process of distillation became fundamental to how Brunschwig thought about medicine. Because distillation purified natural substances by drawing out coarse elements while leaving behind subtle elements, which could more safely integrate into the body, medicines prepared by this process were considered the most efficacious. Distillation also promised a technical means of deriving a universal medicine based on the quintessence, an idea pervasive in both ancient and medieval medical and natural philosophical literature. For Brunschwig, connecting the practical activities of his humble workshop to this venerable tradition was yet another way of framing his unique medical expertise. Part 4, encompassing chapters 6 and 7, focuses on Brunschwig's strategic use of print media to capture and convey embodied and experiential elements of craft medicine. Chapter 6 draws attention to how Brunschwig communicated practical instructions and embodied knowledge through a combination of text and image, thereby approximating a kind of "virtual apprenticeship." In chapter 7, Taape suggests that Brunschwig's regular use of the term erfaren (experience) to describe what he was doing shows that he cautiously favored knowledge based on experience over knowledge based on rational demonstration. Here, Brunschwig's works constitute a case study for the broader cultural phenomenon Taape characterizes as "vernacular empiricism," anticipating the medical empiricism of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by several decades.
Part 5, comprising chapters 8 through 10, focuses on Brunschwig's audience and the longer-term reception of his work from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, and most of it could have been omitted without violence to the book's overarching thesis. Chapter 8's arguments about Brunschwig's intended vernacular audience are thought-provoking and compelling, but chapters 9 and 10 read as though they were rather hastily added. Chapter 9's conclusion, that translators of Brunschwig's works made editorial decisions about structure and language based on what they thought would sell in their local markets, while intuitive and commonsensical, doesn't clearly advance the main argument of the book. The same goes for chapter 10, which traces early modern annotations found in copies of Brunschwig's books, though it reports its results in a somewhat imprecise manner. Taape begins with a sample of "close to" 150 copies of the "books," but we never learn the precise number or distribution of specific works included in the sample. Throughout the chapter, Taape favors rough numbers and rounding when presenting the material. Further, the annotations themselves offer somewhat less information about how people used and understood Brunschwig's texts than one would hope. For example, he claims that a cluster of annotations on Brunschwig's discussion of urinary tract concretions (such as kidney stones) "speaks to a widespread interest in material understandings of health and disease" (p. 213). While this may be the case, it is difficult to judge, as the evidence adduced is quite limited and could just as easily be interpreted as visual finding aids. While these final chapters do not strengthen the book's main argument, they do not detract from the underlying value of Taape's contribution to the ongoing discussion of early modern science and medicine, and the specific details he provides will be of great interest and utility to historians in those fields as well as those researching other topics in German-speaking lands. Hieronymus Brunschwig does indeed offer an illuminating case study of the ways artisans contributed to the production of naturalistic knowledge in the early modern era.
Citation:
Jacob M. Baum.
Review of
Taape, Tillmann.
Crafting Medicine: Artisans, Knowledge, and the Common Man in Hieronymus Brunschwig's Books on Surgery and Distillation.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2026.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=62678
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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