Praxiswelten

Berlin Medical Historical Museum Until 21 September 2014.

Johannes Magirus enjoyed special status in Zerbst, southwest of Berlin, in the mid-seventeenth century. As the town's only academically trained physician, he treated rich and poor alike — and loved to impress the social elite with the breadth of his learning, from physics to astrology.

Magirus is one of eight physicians practising between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries whose working lives are featured in Praxiswelten ('Practice worlds'), an unusual exhibition at the Berlin Medical History Museum. Anatomical knowledge increased dramatically over this time, and understanding of physiology and infection biology began their catch up in the late nineteenth century. As medicine became more scientific, barber-surgeons gradually gave way to university-trained physicians. But as this exhibition shows, the transition to scientific medicine was slow, perhaps because patients clung to the magical beliefs of other healers.

A nineteenth-century amulet used to guard against tooth ache and other ills. Credit: DEUTSCHES MEDIZINHISTORISCHES MUSEUM INGOLSTADT

Praxiswelten showcases ongoing research by a consortium of medical historians who scoured libraries and the countryside for unusual source material: the original notebooks of doctors in German-speaking regions of Europe. It comes as a jolt to see that the notebooks are written in Latin. Also surprising is the enormous detail with which physicians recorded symptoms and the circumstances of patient visits. The notebooks reveal the very individual personal styles of the doctors, who, although exposed to modern knowledge at university, rarely applied it in daily practice. They tended to refer instead to imbalances of the four 'humours' of antiquity — black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm — or more recent theories not based on science.

For example, Friedrich von Bönninghausen, who opened his practice in 1864 in Münster, relied exclusively on homeopathy — despite having trained in Bonn and Berlin, the most prestigious German-speaking centres of medicine at the time. His notebook shows that he treated 11,500 people up to 1889, but he lost patients in droves thereafter. The germ theory of infectious diseases had emerged in Europe by then, thanks to the work of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, and public-hygiene measures such as using clean sources of water had proven so effective that scientific medicine gained in popularity.

In remote regions, neither physicians nor patients had it easy. The ill often had to send urine samples and descriptions of their symptoms using messengers, who needed to be fit. Franz von Ottenthal opened his practice in 1847 in the Alpine Ahrn Valley. His notebook records that he prescribed extract of meadow saffron as a painkiller for one Josef Brugger. But the treatment caused burning sensations in the stomach, as Brugger's messenger informed von Ottenthal. Von Ottenthal sent her back with the advice that Brugger supplement his treatment with sodium bicarbonate and powdered rhubarb. Whether that helped remains unrecorded, but the messenger had to trek a total of 26 rugged kilometres.

Back in 1653, Magirus claimed success in treating a toddler suffering from fever cramps with a range of strange medicines and ointments. The child's father was rich enough to pay for as much as Magirus's renowned knowledge could deliver. The physician consulted specialist literature, and used his mathematical skills to calculate the positions of stars and planets, applying his remedies when the celestial bodies were most propitiously aligned. The exhibition makes one wonder anew that 'alternative therapies' remain so popular today.