The Schneidhaus (cutting house) of the Fugger in Augsburg. A surgical hospital in the Early Modern

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Marion Maria Ruisinger
• Subject Area: History of Science ; Early Modern History
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 407995739

The Schneidhaus (cutting house) of the Fugger in Augsburg is at the centre of this project. The Schneidhaus, a hospital specialised in surgery, was founded by a donation in the 16th century and existed several centuries. To this day scientific research has widely ignored this hospital including this specific type of hospital. Our studies aim at challenging a common belief that the change from hospitals as charitable institutions to places of medical therapy occurred in the 19th or, at the very earliest, during the 18th century. We want to show that charitability and medical therapy were far from being mutually exclusive but could even foster mutually supportive objectives. The main sources for this investigation are the account books and letters in the Fugger Archive as well as an illustrated manuscript from the Schneidhaus, which lists patients and shows coloured images of the extracted bladder stones. These sources facilitate an approach which analyses the functions of visual representation and charitable foundation in the context of the Holy Roman Empire.The rich source material provides manifold insights in the patients of the Schneidhaus with their biographic backgrounds; it will allow analysing and describing the surgeons and physicians with their therapeutic procedures and their conflicts; moreover, the founder families with their specific interests will become tangible. This will be realised by a multi-perspective research program which combines medical, cultural, and local history and focusses on the actors, esp. on the benefactors, the patients and the surgeons. The time range of the investigation reaches from the foundation of the Schneidhaus in 1560 to the last entries in the illustrated manuscript at the end of the 17th century. The analysis of a conflict concerning the continuity of the hospital in the early decades of the 18th century rounds the study off. The results and an the research-process itself are not only to be published for scientific peers, but also – by way of an exhibition – for a broader public.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants