Healers in the Making: Students, Physicians, and Medical Education in Medieval Bologna (1250-1550)

Healers in the Making investigates medical instruction at the University of Bologna using the lens of practical medicine, focusing on both anatomical and surgical instruction and showing that teaching medicine between the late thirteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries was a consciously constructed and vigorous project that required ongoing local political and cultural negotiations beyond books and curriculum. Using municipal, institutional, and medical texts, Kira Robison examines the outward structures of academic and civic power involved in the formation of medical authority and illuminates the innovations in practical medical pedagogy that occurred during this era. In this way, Robison re-examines academic medicine, the professors, and students, returning them to the context of the medical marketplace within a dynamic and flourishing urban landscape.

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Kira Robison, Ph.D. (2012), teaches medieval history at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. Her research focuses on the intersections of medicine, law, and religion, including an recent article in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.