The works of the Breslau (today Wroclaw, Poland) doctor and writer Johann Christoph Ettner were, until the 1980s, scarcely mentioned by scholars of German literature and are still not included in the majority of histories of German literature. There is little information about him and his writings even in the standard bibliographies and reference works, with a few notable exceptions such as the Deutsches Literatur-Lexikon (1972) and Arnold Hirsch's seminal Bürgertum und Barock im deutschen Roman (Middle Class and Baroque in the German Novel, 1934). This situation is remarkable, considering that Ettner's works were, based on the number of reprintings, clearly in demand for two and a half decades and that he wrote a seven-thousand-page novel cycle that links the important baroque genre of the political novel with practical instruction in the medical arts. These novels are a treasure trove of information about the interests and attitudes of...