Common Places and Private Spaces: Libraries, Record-Keeping and Orders of Information in Sixteenth-Century Medicine

Abstract

Scouring the archives for information about Georg Palma, a sixteenth-century municipal physician in Nuremberg, yields the following results. Georg Palma was born in 1543, the eldest son of a physician of French origin, also named Georg Palma. 1 Palma the younger attended Nuremberg's famous grammar school, the Melanchthonschule. 2 He left, probably in 1558, to attend the University of Wittenberg, where he matriculated in 1559. 3 He went on to attend Tuebingen and Padua, before graduating from Ingolstadt in 1568, with the title of Doctor of Medicine. 4 The same year he returned to Nuremberg, where he settled down to live. He married well in 1569 and he practised medicine without great fanfare. 5 He cropped up sporadically in the city's social records, as a founding member of the popular music sodality and as an occasional visitor to the Bishop at Bamberg. 6 When he died in 1591, he left little by way of legacy; no great medical discoveries, no printed volumes in which to assert his medical prowess, no children to carry on and commemorate his name. Instead, Palma was mourned by his contemporaries and quietly disappeared into historical oblivion. 7 The only testament to this early modern physician's life was his considerable library, some 1 Stadtarchiv Nu rnberg, B 19/ 120. 2