Medical Misinformation in Early Modern Germany

Christopher Hutchinson is an assistant professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Mississippi. His research interests include book history, the history of disease, and the popularization of scientific discourses in literature. He has published articles in The German Quarterly and Seminar.

• AcknowledgementsNote on Sources Introduction: Pathologies of Information in Early Modern GermanyChapter One: Plague for a Popular Audience: Suspicions of Print in Late Fifteenth-Century GermanyChapter Two: The French Disease and the Guaiac Cure: Medical Authority in Hutten and ParacelsusChapter Three: The English Sweating Sickness and the Rhetoric of ViralityChapter Four: The Apparatus of Virality: The Sweating Cure and the ReformationChapter Five: Printing Quackery Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

"Sifting through plague pamphlets, treatises on syphilis or 'the sweat,' and works on uroscopy and botany, Hutchinson uncovers the origins of our modern anxieties over medical misinformation—not in the dark corners of the internet, but among early modern German readers and medical authors in the very cities where print was born in Europe. […] Precise and persuasive, Medical Misinformation challenges scholars to rethink the relationship between print, authority, and knowledge in early modern Germany." - Melissa Reynolds, author of Reading Practice: The Pursuit of Natural Knowledge from Manuscript to Print (2024)