Briefpatienten - Die Geschichte der Konsiliarkorrespondenz - Einst weit verbreitete Praxis, erlebt sie heute eine gewisse Renaissance

Abstract

Nowadays, a medical treatment without the personal meeting of the patient and the physician for the initial anamnesis and physical examination is regarded as offending the rules of good clinical practice. For the longest time, however, the epistolary consultation was a wide-spread and well-established practice. The patients' letters preserved in the correspondences of renowned physicians represent one of the main sources for medical historians who try to investigate in the feelings, thoughts and behaviour of patients of the early modern period. The paper discusses the rise and decline of the phenomena of consulting correspondence, analyses the advantages this praxis had both for the patients as for the physicians involved, and presents one example from the correspondence of the physician and surgeon Lorenz Heister (1683-1758).