The medieval barber was the original multitasker—before the days of clean shaves and combs in blue water, a barber might pull your tooth, drain your blood, lance a wound, or pour boiling oil into a gunshot hole and call it medicine. A 16th-century woodcut by German artist Jost Amman summed up the trade in the words of a barber-surgeon himself: “I am called everywhere. I can make many healing salves. I can cure new wounds, also fractures, and chronic afflictions.
Syphilis, cataract, gangrene, pull teeth, shave, wash and cut hair. I also like to bleed. ” It read like the worst dating profile ever written, but it wasn’t wrong. Some of their methods were highly questionable.
For gunshot wounds, medieval barbers routinely poured boiling oil straight into the injury to cauterize it—a bit like drowning your car in a lake because the check-engine light came on. Then came a French barber-surgeon named Ambroise Paré, who changed everything by accident. At the Battle of Turin in 1536, Paré ran out of boiling oil. Forced to improvise, he threw together a salve from egg yolks, oil of roses, and turpentine.
After a sleepless night on the battlefield, he checked on his patients. The ones treated with his slapdash salve were resting comfortably, their wounds not inflamed or swollen. The ones who’d gotten the standard boiling-oil treatment were feverish, tormented with pain, and badly swollen. Paré concluded that no one should ever cauterize a gunshot wound with boiling oil again and began advocating for gentle treatment of wounds—an idea that, minus the egg yolks and turpentine, survives to this day.
For pain relief, barbers offered something called a soporific sponge. It was a primitive form of anesthesia, made by soaking a sea sponge in a mix of hemlock, mandrake, ivy, hyoscyamine, mulberry juice, and opium. The sponge was dried in the sun until all the liquid was consumed. When the barber needed to knock someone out, he dipped the sponge in water and held it under the patient’s nose.
Historians still debate whether the sponge contents were meant to be imbibed, which would have been a very stiff drink—get it, stiff? —because it would probably kill you. Kidney stones were also the barber’s domain, and he often removed them in public with an audience watching. Traveling from town to town with a special lithotomy table, a talented barber could perform the procedure in a few minutes in the town square to advertise his services.
Some were little more than showmen. These so-called “stone cutters” were heavily fined if things didn’t go as planned, because you couldn’t just have anyone with zero medical training performing surgery in public. Bloodletting and leeching are what most people associate with medieval medicine, and the association holds. Medieval folks loved a good bloodletting, believing it was a cure-all for nearly everything.
One medical textbook boasted that bloodletting “clears the mind, strengthens the memory, cleanses the gut, dries up the brain, warms the marrow, sharpens the hearing, curbs tears, promotes digestion, produces a musical voice, dispels sleeplessness, drives away anxiety, feeds the blood, rids it of poisonous matter, and gives long life. ” It also claimed to cure pains, fevers, and various sicknesses and to make the urine clear and clean—which is how everybody likes urine, apparently. In reality, bloodletting does none of those things and can actually be fatal. Yet some doctors were still prescribing it as a treatment for pneumonia as late as 1942—the same year Bambi hit theaters.
Barbers who wanted to advertise their superior bloodletting skills placed bowls of human blood in their shop windows. The bowls may have attracted business from stray dogs and supernatural creatures, but the people of London were disgusted. The blood would congeal and turn putrid, and citizens pushed for a law against the displays. The law passed in 1307, with wording along the lines of: “No barber shall be so bold or so hearty as to put blood in their windows.
” The barbers were miffed—if they couldn’t use the blood for promotion, what were they supposed to do with it, throw it away? Actually, yes. Lawmakers advised barbers to dump their old bowls of blood into the River Thames. This may be where the practice of wrapping a bloody cloth around a pole outside shops began—a grizzly precursor to the modern, wholesome barber pole.
Barbers also used stale urine, known as lotionium, as a shampoo for their clients. The Romans knew urine worked as a cleaning agent, and it did—ammonia does wonders. Whether clients could bring their own locally sourced pee from home remains a matter of historical debate. Some modern folks have tried rinsing their hair with urine, and the general consensus is that while it might keep your hair silky and shiny, your head ends up smelling like pee.
A document from 1499 detailing the affairs of the Barbers’ Guild of Oxford mentioned “alebasters,” a term that initially stumped historians. Research revealed that the lowest class of barbers simply couldn’t afford a plentiful supply of shaving soap, so they used beer foam to baste their clients’ faces instead. Ah, the freshness of a bar rag. Many barbers also worked as chandlers, or candle makers.
Both trades used a lot of wax—barbers for ointments, chandlers for candles. Sometimes barbers would treat a patient by making a wax model of the diseased organ and presenting it at a shrine to call upon the divine. Alternatively, they would make a limb-shaped candle and burn it at a shrine for patients with arm or leg issues. If you see your barber burning a wax effigy of your knees, it’s probably time to find a new barber or get new knees.
Barbers doubled as dentists, because apparently anyone who used pointy instruments at work was considered a general practitioner. The barber would first scrape your teeth with toothpicks and scraps of cloth. Then, to whiten them, he’d use something called aqua fortis—strong water. It sounds great, but aqua fortis was highly corrosive nitric acid.
It did make teeth considerably whiter, but only because it ate away at the enamel, essentially destroying the tooth from the outside in. Between the acid mouthwash and the pee shampoo, medieval barbers probably shouldn’t have been trusted with anything. For a long stretch, barbers didn’t receive the same respect as university-educated physician monks. Physicians didn’t debase themselves by performing bloodletting, kidney stone removal, or tooth extraction—partly because the Pope had forbidden them from doing certain procedures.
Barbers were tasked with the grunt work, including the gory elbow work of dissection while a physician walked them through it step by step. German anatomist Andreas Vesalius helped shake up that status quo. During his second-ever anatomical lecture, he argued that the anatomist would be better served doing the work himself. Vesalius took the knife away from the barber and never looked back.
He was so committed that he even stole the cadavers of executed criminals to use for practice. Medieval life in general was a battle against filth. Peasants had no running water, so bathing required hauling water from wells or rivers by hand. Many bathed with a small amount of unheated water, and those without a suitable indoor area bathed outdoors.
Soap, when used, was often an alkaline solution made from salt and lime. Some peasants decided not to wash at all. Castle dwellers had toilets with a bench and a hole leading to a cesspit—considered the lap of luxury. Peasants used outhouses, often shared with the community, or chamber pots, or if they were out of budget, waste buckets.
They emptied these into nearby cesspits or directly into the river. And instead of toilet paper, they used straw, grass, moss, or hay. The cesspits also received all kinds of garbage. Someone had the job of cleaning them out, and even then, the pits often leaked, contaminating groundwater and soil.
Layering was common. Clothing next to the skin was linen, with wool over it. People knew washing clothes helped keep parasites away, and etiquette books advised changing underwear daily. But peasants usually couldn’t afford multiple sets.
The lucky ones changed into fresh garments once a week, washing their other clothes in the river with lye soap. Unfortunately, rivers were polluted with human waste, garbage, and animal runoff. Parasites were a fact of life. Combers added finer teeth to combs so people could remove dirt and lice—so you can thank lice-covered medieval peasants for your fine-tooth comb.
People often deloused each other, and these gatherings became a social activity. Peasants liked keeping themselves as clean as they could; it was a sign of pride and common etiquette. Washing the face and hands after waking and before meals was especially important, since people ate with their hands. Beds were made of straw, which was relatively comfortable and insulating, but bugs and vermin stuck around.
People mixed scented flowers and herbs like mint, chamomile, and lavender into the straw to combat infestations. Those who could afford it had linen sheets and woolen blankets. For women, menstruation in medieval times was no easy task. Many probably used torn rags.
Some theories suggest women wrapped cloth strips around a small twig and used it as a tampon, or collected absorbent moss as a pad. It’s likely some simply bled on their clothing. Religious authorities shamed menstruation, and women often hid it, carrying scented herbs to mask any odor. Considering women lived short, hard lives with heavy labor and little sustenance, they likely had fewer periods overall than modern women.
For dental hygiene, peasants used twigs, especially from hazel trees. Some rubbed wool over their teeth and rinsed with water. Those who could afford it mixed salt and sage into a paste. Because sugar was rare, peasants had few cavities, but stone-ground bread wore their teeth down.
If a tooth went bad, a barber pulled it, usually while the patient got drunk since there was no anesthesia. The peasant diet consisted mostly of beans, grains, vegetables, and onions grown on their farms. Soil and water could be tainted with waste. There was no refrigeration, so fresh vegetables were impossible in winter, and stored grains could rot or attract vermin.
Fungi could poison grain, causing stomach distress and sickness. Meat was a luxury; if a peasant managed to get some, it had to be salted and dried to keep from decaying. If crops failed, people starved. Medicine didn’t help much.
Doctors adopted the theory of humorism, believing sickness came from imbalances in the body. They thought parasites originated inside people and caused imbalance, and theorized that eating less fruit could prevent lice. They didn’t understand the connection between filth, infestation, and sickness, so no one was safe. Mirrors were a luxury, usually small and made of lead-backed glass or polished metal.
Many medieval men went to a barber for a weekly shave; peasants who couldn’t afford it and didn’t own mirrors simply didn’t shave, making most villages a total beard town. To combat parasites, people tried herbal remedies—spreading glue on bread with a candle in the middle to attract bed fleas, washing hair with sea salt water, or sniffing lavender. Ineffective treatments included burning chamomile seeds and inhaling the smoke, or holding infected limbs over steaming water. For the nonexistent “earworms,” doctors poured bitter medicine into people’s ears.
Bitter herbs for other parasites caused horrible diarrhea. If a patient vomited or suffered a painful bowel movement, doctors thought they were cursed. Despite all this, medieval peasants also had encounters with royalty. Kings and queens performed rituals rooted in religion.
One was washing the feet of beggars, adapted from the biblical story of Jesus bathing his followers’ feet. European royals performed this around Easter, using commoners as props in their displays of piety. Another royal ritual was “touching for the king’s evil”—the healing of scrofula, a lymphatic disease considered an evil only a king could cure. From around the 11th to 17th centuries, afflicted people would line up before their monarch, who would place hands on them and present them with a specially made coin.
King Edward the Confessor of England supposedly sprinkled a woman’s face with water while making the sign of the cross, after which worms and “much bloodier matter” came out of her lesions. The witness claimed it worked, saying God had wiped away her unsightliness. The idea that a king could heal suggested direct communication with God—a belief monarchs were happy to spread. Not all participated, though.
William of Orange was skeptical of his ability to heal anything. Meetings between commoners and sovereigns could be political. In 1381, against the backdrop of the Peasants’ Revolt, King Richard II met with the movement’s leader, Wat Tyler, on June 15th. It didn’t go well.
The Lord Mayor of London attacked Tyler, Tyler fought back, was apprehended, and executed that day. It’s hardly surprising that the commoner was the only one who wound up dead. Relationships between royals and commoners did happen. King Edward IV of England had mistresses who were commoners and even married Elizabeth Woodville, technically a commoner.
A monarch’s most public event was the royal entry into cities and towns, where civic officials and tradesmen served key roles. When Isabella of Bavaria entered Paris in 1389, 1,200 citizens participated in the spectacle. There were street performances, and commoners could even enjoy free alcohol—a fountain near Saint-Denis ran with streams of claret and spiced wine. King Louis IX of France went further.
He held daily audiences with commoners under an oak tree at Vincennes, directly interacting with subjects of every social rank—a medieval version of a presidential town hall. Royals also gave alms to the poor during marriages, coronations, and religious ceremonies, and some did it personally. Part of being a ruler meant hearing complaints. King Charles V of France met with commoners daily after services, kindly pausing to listen to the petitions of rich and poor alike, responding charitably to reasonable requests and turning doubtful ones over to officials.
But there were rules. When Wat Tyler met Richard II, he sent for a flagon of water to rinse his mouth and did so “in a very rude and disgusting fashion before the king’s face. ” He also drew his dagger in the king’s presence. His coarse behavior was enough to provoke the Lord Mayor, and we know how that turned out.
Kings and queens also maintained links with religious communities through patronage, expecting abbeys and monasteries to accommodate them while traveling. They relied on traveling agents to dispense justice, though they did personally oversee high-profile trials. Louis IX served as a judge for trials accessible to anyone, asking if anyone had a case and assuring them they would be heard. Medieval kingship also meant military prowess.
Kings who led troops into battle were revered, though it was risky. Richard the Lionheart was brought down by a crossbow while managing a siege, and Richard III was slain on the battlefield. Contrary to Tom Petty, it’s not always good to be the king. Medieval Christmas feasts were a chance to show off elaborate foods with exotic ingredients.
The boar’s head was a classic, with a carol written around 1500 to celebrate it. Those who couldn’t afford a wild boar baked a cake in its shape instead. A 16th-century German cookbook recommended boiling a wild boar’s head, basting it with wine, and serving it with a black sauce made of fat, flour, wine, and cherry syrup, with sugar, ginger, pepper, cloves, and cinnamon for flavor. Roast peacock, served redressed in its own feathers, was a showstopper, with the highest-titled lady carrying it to the table.
Cooks would skin and roast the bird, then cover it in its feathers to recreate the look of a live one. A 15th-century Italian cookbook suggested a sauce of ginger, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pepper, wine, and a little sugar. But peacock could be tough and flavorless, so cooks sometimes replaced the meat with goose, sewing better meat inside the exotic skin—a medieval turducken. Christmas celebrations often stretched for days, blending with saint days.
St. Lucia’s Day on December 13th featured St. Lucia buns made with saffron, with raisins pressed into the dough to represent the martyr’s gouged-out eyes. Nothing says “eat me” like gouged eyeballs.
Richard the Lionheart served guests mincemeat pies, then called Christmas pies. The tradition dated to the Crusades, when crusaders returned with spices like ginger and cloves, supposedly representing the gifts of the Magi. Cooks seasoned leftover meat with these spices and baked it in a pastry shaped like a manger, topped with a pastry baby Jesus. People tried to eat one pie for each of the 12 days of Christmas, but they weren’t allowed to cut them with a knife—it was thought unlucky to cut through the crib of baby Jesus.
The pies have since stopped resembling the manger, which is probably for the best, because now you can use a knife. Eel was a popular Christmas dish, prepared differently by region: mustard sauce or smoked in Sweden, wine or almond milk in southern Europe, wine with saffron and ginger in Germany. Gingerbread was a Christmas staple, with a 15th-century recipe calling for boiled, skimmed honey mixed with saffron, pepper, grated bread, and cinnamon, shaped into a square. Bakers used wooden molds to shape their creations.
Pottage, a word for anything cooked in a pot, was often a stew. A Christmas version started with boiled leg of beef, then added red wine, beer, cloves, nutmeg, boiled apples, currants, raisins, and prunes. Another type, por, was made from boiled leeks—basically leek soup. Figgy pudding, mentioned in “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” was a thickened medieval porridge, more stew than solid dish, made by blanching almonds, adding wine and water, then figs, raisins, ginger, and honey, boiled down until thick.
Instead of eggnog, medieval Europeans drank posset, a thick alcoholic beverage of egg, cream, and beer or wine, thickened with bread, oatmeal, or almond paste. Sugar plums were a seasonal favorite, made by boiling plums in clarified sugar and letting them dry, lasting all year. Many recipes called for beer, and medieval ale was a household staple—watery, made from grain, water, and yeast, without hops. A medieval recipe for ale called for over four pounds of malt, a pound and a half of rolled oats, and thirteen quarts of water.
The everyday medieval diet was surprisingly heart-healthy. Almond milk was a common pantry staple, especially during fasting when animal products were forbidden. It didn’t spoil as quickly as dairy. There was fast food, too—places serving meat pies, hot cakes, pancakes, and wafers for immediate consumption.
These medieval McDonald’s had a similar reputation: low quality, dirty, and dishonest, sometimes using tainted rabbit in the pies. Peasants ate two to three pounds of bread and grain per day, washed down with a gallon of low-alcohol ale—about 4,500 calories total. With 12-hour workdays of manual labor, they probably burned it off. Raw fruits and vegetables were usually cooked, since people believed they carried disease.
A 1500 book warned, “Beware of green salads and raw fruits, for they will make your master sick. ” Salads were for the lower classes; the rich tended to shun vegetables, though they might accept an onion or garlic. Pork was prized, and suckling pig was a status symbol. Even hedgehogs, seals, and whales appeared on some menus.
At a feast in 1467 by Archbishop Neville of York, 6,000 guests ate several tons of meat, including swans, peacocks, and over 13,500 other birds, washed down with 400 casks of alcohol. Christmas dinner was usually goose—rich folk smothered it in butter and saffron; poorer families had a bland goose that cost a day’s pay. Both enjoyed umble pie, made from ground up animal entrails. Beans were a game-changer.
When legume cultivation spread in the 10th century, it added protein to the diet of hard workers. The population doubled within a few hundred years. Beans were thought to be an aphrodisiac, leading to the saying, “The more you eat, the more you want to make babies. ”
Baking was serious business, with powerful guilds that functioned like a union and the mob combined.
Bakers paid fees and got insurance—if anything ever happened to their business or family, the guild paid out. The guilds also protected master bakers’ recipes. Sweets were rare for commoners but not unheard of in the middle class. Desserts were served between courses as palate cleansers.
King Richard III lived up to his royal diet. Archaeologists analyzed his bones and found he ate plenty of freshwater fish, wild fowl, and, in his final years, a lot of wine. The medieval diet may have been better for the heart than modern diets—it lacked refined sugars, and people actually worked hard. Dr.
Roger Henderson told the BBC that the medieval man was at much lower risk for coronary heart disease and diabetes than the modern man, and suggested it as a better model for the 21st century than the Mediterranean diet. The medieval Catholic Church used fear to keep parishioners in line. Images of the hellmouth—a ferocious beast devouring sinners—greeted people at church doors. The message: obey the church or this will happen to you.
Churches were decorated with doom paintings and images of sinners being punished. Purgatory was a huge concern, and parishioners could ensure a shorter wait by donating money or goods, attending services, or purchasing a certificate for early release. There was one surefire way to skip purgatory entirely: donate a child to the church. It replenished the clergy’s numbers, and for the child, it meant better food, cleanliness, and an education.
But many children were victimized by church leaders in inappropriate ways. Weeping and bleeding statues were considered powerful omens of evil events, and the church exploited this superstition. The faithful could literally buy forgiveness with cash. Undertake a sin in advance—robbery or murder—by purchasing an advanced pardon.
The church also sold tickets out of purgatory, not just for yourself but also for deceased loved ones, issuing physical certificates proving your relative was on the way to heaven. Adulterers in medieval times feared getting caught. Public shaming was severe—accused adulterers might have to walk nude through the streets, the literal “walk of shame. ” Despite the punishment, adultery remained popular.
For some, the shame was part of the game. The hellmouth sculptures were just the beginning. Churches were filled with images of tortured saints and sinners in hell, created by the greatest artists of the day, who had vivid and terrifying imaginations. Poor parishioners gave livestock or coins; the middle and upper classes donated silver candlesticks, linen altar cloths, pews, or even ornate altarpieces and stained glass windows.
Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, particularly the Inferno, heavily inspired the church’s art and imagery. For the church, it was an invaluable resource for frightening the faithful into obedience—mostly to keep people giving their money, property, and children. Some people simply didn’t care, skipping church to drink, gamble, or sleep late. But sins were absolutely forgivable if the right price was paid.
Since refusing to pay meant a one-way ticket to hell, most people paid. The medieval serf was at the very bottom of the social ladder. At one point, a whopping 75% of the population was a serf. Serfs were bound to the land and lords had great power over them.
In one Swiss canton, a lord could imprison a serf indefinitely or take all his possessions. In some places, it was legally acceptable to murder a serf who got into an argument with a tenant. In Aragon, a lord could technically kill a man who killed his own dependent, but bloodshed was off-limits—so lords disposed of serfs through starvation, thirst, or exposure to the elements. Serfs were given a small plot of land, around 12 acres, to feed their families.
But by law, everything a serf owned belonged to the lord and could be taken at any time. Unlike slaves, serfs couldn’t be sold, but their labor could be—and in Russia, they were totally up for sale. Russian forces were extremely dependent on serf and peasant labor, boosting soldiers to over a million by the 19th century. A freed serf would be let loose with no land or money—like a theater major after college.
A serf had to ask his lord for permission to marry. The Abbott of Upper Swabia placed regulations on who could marry, with consequences for marrying beneath one’s class. If a peasant married a penniless serf, half the peasant’s estate was confiscated and the rest taxed to death. Sick days existed but were limited—two to three weeks a year.
A cruel lord could force a plague-stricken serf to work, and if the illness left him unable to do so, he could be punished. Other manors allowed serfs to quit work for the day, but they had to make it up later. Serfs worked three to four days a week, at backbreaking agricultural chores. Women cooked, did housework, baked bread, made wool, milked cows, and took care of children.
If pressing wine was needed, the serf had to pay for the wine press. Medieval courts had no time for serf disputes. Cases between serfs and lords were handled in the lord’s own manor court, and it’s no surprise the judge—the lord himself—rarely ruled against himself. Serfs lived in huts with thatched, dried-vegetation roofs, wood walls, one or two rooms with dirt floors, and a hearth with a smoke hole in the ceiling.
The roofs were famously flammable, and the huts were known to catch fire. During times of upheaval, some serfs would slip away in the night to escape their lords. It was risky—they could catch the plague, be attacked, or be captured and returned for severe punishment. Surfdom ended gradually.
Normandy experienced its peasants’ revolt in 996. England followed in 1381 with its own uprising, and Queen Elizabeth I formally abolished the practice in 1574. It mostly faded out by the end of the 14th century. But surfdom paved the way for ugly times in American history, when early colonizers used the system as a model for free labor.
Indentured servants had the opportunity to pay for their freedom, but colonizers soon concluded they didn’t have to offer a price for freedom if they imported free labor from Africa—beginning the grim chapter of involuntary, lifelong slavery. The medieval executioner did a lot more than swing a blade. They upheld justice, set an example for the community, served as a medical professional, and often doubled as a spiritual guide. We know this thanks to Franz Schmidt, an axeman in 16th-century Nuremberg who left detailed diaries.
On August 13, 1577, Schmidt had one job: execute Hans Vogl, convicted of murder. It would be his first execution at his new post in Nuremberg. Schmidt came to the profession honestly—his father, Hinrich, was originally a woodsman, but Bavarian magistrate Albrecht II once forced him at random to hang three men. Afterward, nobody in the village would have anything to do with him, and Schmidt followed him into the occupation.
Since 1573, Schmidt had performed his duties 361 times, plus 345 minor punishments like floggings and amputations. He’d taken out criminals by sword, rope, burning, drowning, and, in particularly bad cases, on the breaking wheel. Despite the dishonorable nature of the profession, he was respected for his piety. It was customary for the axeman to bond with the prisoner.
If a prisoner had wounds or fell ill, the executioner would nurse him back to health so he could eventually be executed—job security. Prisoners received visitors, and one time Schmidt saw a condemned killer offered oranges and gingerbread by his victim’s widow. He saw it as a sign she had forgiven him. The chaplain visited prisoners to soften their hearts and convince them to confess and beg for forgiveness, using illustrated prayer books and woodcuts to illustrate sermons.
Everyone was sincere in their desire to get Vogl ready for his final day. Taking someone out in public served two goals: first, to shock spectators and prevent future crimes; second, to reaffirm divine and human authority. The execution was like a morality play. The condemned sinner sees the error of his ways, atones, and agrees to serve as an example in exchange for a quick, painless end and the promise of salvation.
The final meal usually included copious amounts of wine and beer—it was to the executioner’s advantage to have a drunk prisoner who was less resistant. There were downsides, though; Schmidt once saw a condemned rogue eat and drink so much his belly burst as he swung from the gallows. Vogl finished his meal and was dressed in a white linen gown. Schmidt was announced by the warden: “The executioner is at hand.
” He took the stage, asked Vogl for forgiveness, and shared a drink of peace. At the blood court, the judges in red and black robes heard the confession and chose the manner of demise. The jurors voted: the sword. The crowd had become enormous—these events were advertised weeks in advance, and hundreds or thousands of onlookers gathered.
Vogl walked a mile to the place of his end. It went smoothly, though that wasn’t always the case. One drunken prisoner urinated openly when he reached the gallows, then requested the chance to fence and fight four guards. As Schmidt wrote in his journal, the request was refused.
Over his 45-year career, Schmidt ended 187 people with a sword, and only four times did he need a second stroke. Being good was necessary—in some German towns, if a swordsman failed in three blows, the crowd would force him to take the condemned’s place. The crowds, packed with rowdy drunks, could riot if they didn’t see a head drop. When the moment arrived, Schmidt dispatched Vogl with one clean swipe.
The judge expressed satisfaction, and Schmidt replied, “For that, I thank God and my master, who has taught me such art. ”
Then came the mundane task of cleaning up the mess—the executioner was also the janitor. Schmidt didn’t know it yet, but in 1617 he would retire and begin a career as a medical consultant, and in 1634 he would receive a state funeral at Nuremberg’s most prominent cemetery, buried just paces from legendary artists Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs. And he did it all without wearing a hood, even once.
What kind of life would that be?
