From the 1780s on, the court of the Princes of Schwarzenberg generally maintained four or five personal doctors. These privileged positions were frequently held by individuals who also practised as municipal or county physicians. In their castles in Bohemia the Schwarzenbergs also employed surgeons and apothecaries, and in line with the professionalization of medical care during the Enlightenment they attached great importance to the training of health workers. In the first three decades of the 19th century health care in the context of the Schwarzenberg primogeniture became even more specialized and the number of medical staff on the various Schwarzenberg estates increased. In addition to their own physicians, the Schwarzenbergs also entrusted their health needs to eminent medical experts drawn primarily from the Habsburg court and the University of Vienna and later, from the 1830s on, to many doctors working in the Czech Lands. This study considers the relationship between the high nobility as representatives of social elites on the one hand and the Enlightenment medicalization of society with its professionalization of health care on the other. It maps the structure of medical care within one aristocratic family and their estates and its transformation over a fifty‐year period. It also attempts to discover who the Schwarzenbergs’ doctors were and what socio‐cultural background they came from., Václav Grubhoffer., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
Between the Baroque and Romanticism attitudes to death and the discursive framework of the emotional experience of dying fundamentally changed among the Catholic high nobility. The ideal baroque death was supposed to take the form of an extreme point at which the dying person confessed their sins through theatrical gestures and utterances. The deathbed ritual explicitly confirmed the denominational and spiritual orientation of the family. In succeeding generations, both aristocrats and commoners were expected to be confirmed in that orientation by a written and iconographic testimony rich in symbols. Romanticism, on the other hand, imbued the process of dying with sentiment, loving care and family cohesion, which among the high nobility brought solace and a peaceful death. Finally, between the Baroque and Romanticism the relative status of private and public experience of the last moments changed. The Baroque "theatrical" deathbed, which was presented with the central figure of the dying individual and the priest, was a public event. Gradually it changed into a more intimate, quiet contemplation with only a few witnesses gathered in the family circle. Moreover, the doctor came to replace the priest as the chief attendant at the dying person’s bedside. What remained unchanged was the anxious determination to conform to expected patterns of behaviour. By trying to fulfil the contemporary ideal of a "good death", the counts of Martinice and the princes of Schwarzenberg tried to affirm their unique position in Bohemian (and European) aristocratic society. Their emotional experience of death was intended to serve as an example to their descendants and form one of the constitutive elements of the family’s collective memory., Václav Grubhoffer, Josef Kadeřábek., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy