Heinrich Steinhöwel

Heinrich Steinhöwel (born about 1411 or 1412 in Weil der Stadt, died in Ulm) was a German physician and humanist, counted among the earliest representatives of the German early Renaissance. He studied in Vienna, took the master's degree in 1436, and later served as rector of the arts students at Padua, where he also earned a medical degree; Heidelberg entered him as a doctor of medicine in 1444. After practising in Esslingen he was called in 1450 as town physician of Ulm, a post he held for some thirty years, and he also served the court of Württemberg as personal physician. Besides his medical work he wrote a plague regimen as a teacher of his younger surgeon colleagues and translated texts such as Apollonius of Tyre, the story of Griseldis, the Famous Women and Aesop's fables into German; the Aesop, printed at Ulm between 1475 and 1480, was reprinted widely. The older Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie gives his death as 1482 or 1483, the newer Neue Deutsche Biographie as 1479.