Dynamics of Healer-Patient Confidentiality in Early Modern Witch Trials

Confidentiality from BelowCan we talk about healer-patient confidentiality in the early modern period?The legal notion of confidentiality is very recent.In Imperial Germany, for instance, medical confidentiality only became a legal requirement for health professionals in 1871.1 Since the Hippocratic Oath, however, patient information has been considered private, and its protecting has been part of the medical code of conduct.The oath postulates:And whatsoever I shall see or hear in the course of my profession, as well as outside my profession in my intercourse with men, if it be what should not be published abroad, I will never divulge, holding such things to be holy secrets.Now if I carry out this oath, and break it not, may I gain for ever reputation among all men for my life and for my art; but if I transgress it and forswear myself, may the opposite befall me.2Different historical periods have informed the parameters of medical confidentiality as we know it today,3 but the issue of not wanting compromising information to become widely available had existed long before the laws that formalise this kind of privacy.Health practitioners of the past had to use their own discretion when they acquired sensitive information.No legal standard