Hieronymus Brunschwig

Hieronymus Brunschwig (c. 1450 to c. 1512) was a German surgeon, alchemist and botanist born in the free imperial city of Strasbourg. Trained as a craftsman in the guild of barbers and bathers, he treated medicine as a practical craft grounded in manual skill and experience, and archival evidence places him among barbers drafted for the Burgundian campaigns of the 1470s. He later travelled through Alsace, Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia and the Rhineland, practising surgery and learning the distillation of medicinal substances, and settled in Strasbourg near the end of the fifteenth century. In 1497 he published the Buch der Cirurgia, the first printed surgical treatise in German, which gathered ancient and medieval knowledge and gave some of the earliest detailed discussions of gunshot wounds, fractures and dislocations. His Liber de arte distillandi de simplicibus, also called the Kleines Destillierbuch, helped establish the genre of distillation books for non-academic readers.