Gesnerus. Swiss Journal for the History of Medicine and Science, 1943-2020

The volume you hold in your hand is the last issue of our journal in its present form. Gesnerus, continuously published since 1943, will continue with a new name, a new team, and new patrons. From 2021 onwards, it will be known as the European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health (EHMH), edited jointly by the Swiss Society for the History of Medicine and Natural Sciences and the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health and will be published by Brill (Leiden). In the early 1920s, 100 years ago, the Swiss Society for the History of Medicine and the Natural Sciences was founded by two very different private scholars, between whom there was nevertheless a certain affi nity.1 One was Arnold C. Klebs (1870-1943), a physician from Bern and former director of the Chicago Tuberculosis Institute, who now resided as a wealthy private citizen in Nyon on Lake Geneva. The other was Henry E. Sigerist (1891-1957), who came from a wealthy Schaffhausen family and was in the process of completing his habilitation thesis in medical history in Zurich. The two are paradigmatic representatives of those whom the society, founded in 1921, wanted to address. As Klebs himself put it in a letter to Sigerist: “We want to attract the collector as well as the philosopher, and also those who are simply sentimentally interested in the old.” 2 With the collector, Klebs had careful empirical scholars like himself in mind; with the phi-