Volume 43, Issue 3, September 2012, Pages 700–709
Centre and Periphery in the Eighteenth-Century Habsburg 'Medical Empire'
Abstract
This
essay discusses the question of health in the Kingdom of Hungary during
the Age of Enlightenment. It explores the relationships and tensions
between central theories of medical police and the local expectations of
government administrators, as well as those between academic or
official knowledge and implicit or alternative knowledge about health.
The reigns of Maria Theresia and Joseph II marked the moment at which
particular kinds of folk and practical knowledge about healing became
visible and above all legible. This is to be seen in the enormous rise
in book production, which in itself represented an ‘approved knowledge’
that found legitimation in new academic and bureaucratic institutions,
such as the reformed medical faculty of the University of Vienna, the
newly-founded medical faculty at Tyrnau, the establishment of a health
department within the Hungarian Statthalterei, as well as in the emission of royal legislation supporting the agendas of the new enlightened science of ‘medical police’.
Keywords
- Medicine;
- Medicalisation;
- Physicians;
- Habsburg;
- Hungary;
- Eighteenth century
Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
