Medicine and the Making of a City: Spaces of Pharmacy and Scholarly Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Stockholm.

Abstract

This essay takes seventeenth-century Stockholm as its point of departure in discussing the many spaces to which early modern medicine belonged, in particular the court, the cityscape, the site of the pharmacy, and the city’s Collegium Medicum. It shows how scholarly medicine and pharmacy arose along with the city itself. They were a part of the city and of its many interlaced local, European, and global flows and relationships. Thus the essay offers new perspectives on medicine as part of, and a driving force behind, Stockholm’s transition from a medieval town to the capital of an early modern state, as well as the city’s integration into the early modern system of global trade. It also shows how a switch of perspective may relocate pharmacy to the center of the seventeenth-century medical world. By focusing on the city, rather than on specific professional groups, the essay seeks to problematize the alleged special importance of physicians for early modern medicine and the view that physicians held a superior status in relation to other medical practitioners, as well as to artisans/craftsmen.