A philosophical and scientific eclectic, Dr. Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742) brought together the wisdom of ancient writers with the new science and philosophy of his day. In the Medicus Politicus (The Politic Physician) (1738) he applied his concepts to medicine and medical ethics. The Medicus Politicus contains the lecture notes of Hoffmann as first professor of medicine at the University of Halle. The work is divided into three parts: the personal characteristics required by the new politic physician; the physician's relationship with other members of the medical community (often competitors); and the patient-physician relationship. This dissertation provides the first comprehensive English-language philosophical analysis and commentary on this work. It addresses two issues found in the Medicus Politicus: Hoffmann's model for the new physician and the medical ethics required in the patient-physician relationship. The political, intellectual and religious upheavals of the Long Eighteenth Century inform the work of Hoffmann. Physicians were not yet considered professionals and competed with the untrained. The new Hoffmannian physician would change that and would develop the personal qualities that were found in the professions of theology and law. Specifically, the Hoffmannian physician would be moral, rational and clinically competent. Hoffmann provided two independent but harmonious foundations to justify these requirements: one theological and one rational. Specifically, Hoffmann was an enthusiastic Pietist, a Natural Law theorist and an evidence-based scientist. His applied ethics is one of the most complete systems ever found in the medical clinical setting as it addresses each stage of the healing process. The focus of the patient-physician relationship is trust and trustworthiness. The physician is trustworthy when he is compassionate and competent. Patient and physician work together towards a mutual goal of the patient's healing. The judgments of both patient and physician are directed by prudence--seeking that which preserves society and individuals. This very mature concept of the ethics of the patient-physician relationship founded on trust and trustworthiness is the basis of modern concepts of patient, fiduciary trust, medical ethics and medicine as a profession. / text

In the last decades a number of studies have shed light on early modern scientific experience. While some of these studies have focused on how new facts were forced out of nature in so-called experimental situations, others have charted long-term transformations. In this dissertation I explore a rather different facet of scientific experience by focusing on the case of the Prussian university town Halle in the period from the late seventeenth till the mid-eighteenth century. At this site philosophers, theologians and physicians were preoccupied with categories such as inner senses, inner experience, living experience, psychological experiments and psychometrics. In the study I argue that these hitherto almost completely overlooked categories take us away from observations of external things to the internal organisation of experience and to entirely internal objects of experience. Rather than seeing this internal side of scientific experience as mere theory and epistemology, I argue that it was an integral and central part of what has been referred to as the cultura animi tradition, that is, the philosophical and medical tradition of approaching the soul as something in need of cultivation, education, disciplination and cure. The study contains four empirical chapters. In the first chapter I analyse the meaning and function of experience in Christian Wolff’s philosophy understood as spiritual exercise and cultura animi. In the second chapter I examine experience in the theologian Hermann Francke’s cultura animi, focusing particularly on the relation between scientific experience and what scholars have referred to as religious experience. In the third chapter I chart aesthetic experience in Alexander Baumgarten’s aesthetics. In the fourth chapter I examine the role of experience in the medicine of Georg Ernst Stahl, Friedrich Hoffmann and their followers. The analysis of medical experience channels the discussion into questions regarding the relation between the cultura animi tradition and the kind of attitudes, practices and processes that have been connected to modern objectivity.