["Thus it passes from the patient's purse into that of the doctor without causing displeasure" - Samuel Hahnemann and medical fees]. / "Und es sammelte sich ohne Verdruss von Seiten des Kranken in des Arztes Beutel" - Samuel Hahnemann und die Honorarfrag.

In 1834, Hahnemann gave the following advice to his pupil Dr. Karl Julius Aegidi: "We are not allopaths who have high medical fees and can legally demand high sums for evil deeds. We must take what we have earned on the spot, since we are not considered worthy of ordinary justice." In an earlier letter to the same addressee, Hahnemann wrote: "No one enters my house if he does not have with him the money to pay me, unless he is paying me monthly, in advance [...]." There can be no doubt that in Hahnemann's times, fees were the most important component in a physician's income. Dependency on fee income meant that the physician always had to worry about delayed and even avoided payments, and patients' reluctance to pay was notorious. Many doctors lost large parts of their nominal income through bad debts. In some cases, installments were accepted by both parties, to avoid costly legal action, which were usually a last resort. In these circumstances it is hardly surprising to find Hahnemann, the founder of a highly disputed new cure, stressing to his colleagues that for a successful medical practice, cash payments at the time of treatment or in advance were preferable to post-facto bills. Having been ostracized by the medical establishment, Hahnemann showed a remarkable professional awareness of patients' propensity to debt. Long before regular physicians propagated cash payment, Hahnemann derived his income solely from ready-money payments. However, he used a sliding fee structure to allow for the different economic circumstances of his patients, who came from all walks of life. The very poor he treated for free, while members of the rural and urban middle class had to pay considerable fees. In some cases, Hahnemann was able to charge very high fees, and his numerous enemies used this against him.

[Not Available]. / "La douleur des dents est la plus grande". Zur Geschichte des Zahnschmerzes in der Frühen Neuzeit.

Pain, and toothache in particular, belongs to the most basic human experiences. This paper describes how the experience of pain is shaped and modified by individual human minds and by specific medical cultures. It explores what social historians of medicine call the historical, social, cultural, and psychological construction of pain. The story of how people reconstruct the experience of pain in past and present demands that we look beyond the medical gaze. The voices most often neglected in medical history belong of course to patients. However, their testimony is difficult to recover, except for more recent times. We have to look therefore for their hidden voices in diaries, memoirs, essays, poems, novels and other literary genres. These scattered records and fragmentary episodes of bouts of illness suggest that the history of toothache cannot be reduced to a parable about biomedical progress, but stands at the crossroad of bodies, minds, and cultures.

[Valentin Rösswurm: on the social history of Paracelsism in the 16th century]. / Valentin Rösswurm: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Paracelsismus im 16. Jahrhundert.

The reactions awakened in his own day by the lithotomist Valentin Rösswurm were not many but varied. Up to now only the controversy about his Paracelsus connection has been mentioned in some studies on Paracelsian medicine in 16th-century England. Nothing has been known so far about the social background of the foreign doctor who came to England from the Continent. New documents found in various European archives enable us to reconstruct the career of another disciple of Paracelsus who earned his living by lithotomy and herniotomy, being one of the many itinerant surgeons who flocked European cities in the early modern period. The new evidence also does justice to a man accused of being a quack by his English critics but who was in fact an experienced and literate surgeon no better and no worse than the local healers with whom he competed for wealthy clients.