This article examines how municipal physicians and surgeons in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Prussia employed narrative as a means to navigate, negotiate and, at times, reshape the medical bureaucracy. I argue that narratives themselves functioned as active instruments of agency. My case study comprises 37 application processes in various towns of the Prussian provinces of Neumark and Kurmark, spanning roughly 170 individual documents. I show how healers mobilised petitions to intervene in appointment procedures, appeal across multiple administrative levels and redefine the terms of professional legitimacy. Central to these practices were what literary scholars have described as ‘circumstantial narratives’, accounts of the smallest details of a case. Regarding application processes, narratives often included tales of conspiracy, loyalty, personal hardship, precarity, selfless sacrifices or unfair treatment. They were intended to soften qualification criteria, justify exemptions and contest hiring decisions. Under the multilayered system of cascaded decision-making, unsuccessful applicants could reframe their cases for different authorities, exploiting contradictions between local, provincial and central hiring considerations. Paradoxically, while this structure was administratively inefficient, it created opportunities for physicians and surgeons to sway outcomes or at least suspend decisions. By contrast, after the Prussian reforms of 1808–1815, centralised appointments limited such manoeuvring, reducing healers’ ability to recalibrate their stories across multiple levels. In examining these petitions, I situate healers’ narratives within the broader ‘application culture’ of the turn of the nineteenth century. Far from passive victims of bureaucracy, healers emerged as bureaucratic actors in their own right, deploying narrative as a tactical resource. This study thus contributes to the history of physicians’ narratives, the historiography of medical complaints and the study of public health bureaucracy, showing how narratives shaped not only individual careers but also the development of public health administration in Germany.
Stephan Strunz (Wed,) studied this question.