States of healing in early modern Germany

Abstract

Lists and tables that were used in war offices, regiments, and field hospitals to account for soldiers and their physical state had the long-term epistemic effect of establishing the notion of the military population as a dynamic factor. The relationship between military medicine and the management of military manpower is manifest in the military papers of the Electorate of Hanover and the Kingdom of Prussia from the 1680s to the 1760s. During this period, close proximity of civil and military medicine reshaped notions of military manpower as one of the key assets of the early modern state. Individual soldiers and their bodies were transformed into populations that could be measured and managed on a large scale. Such developments fit with broader processes during the period, when population emerged both as a theoretical concept and a field of political intervention. This culminated in the mid-eighteenth century in new evidence-based and statistical approaches to policy and politics. Military health care and the management of manpower played a key role in this process. Eighteenth-century military populations were considered to be assets for waging war. Within the context of cameralism, their utility can be interpreted in terms of a military economy of the body.