The Conspiracy of Silence: Friedrich Hoffmann and the Governance of Medical Dissent in Early-Eighteenth-Century Prussia

Drawing on previously unpublished archival materials from Berlin and Halle, this article reconstructs why Friedrich Hoffmann fell from royal favour at the Prussian court in 1712 and was replaced by Georg Ernst Stahl. At the centre of the analysis stands a hitherto marginal figure: Andreas von Gundelsheimer, court physician to Frederick I, whose authority rested on cosmopolitan experience, sovereign intimacy, and silence. What emerges is a structural condition the article terms a ‘conspiracy of silence’: not a coordinated pact, but a regime in which decorum medicum functioned as a technology of political governance, recasting epistemic disagreement as disciplinary insubordination. Hoffmann’s affair is less an anomaly than a telling sign of the broader subordination of medical knowledge to state authority then underway in Prussia, in which therapeutic dissent was reframed as behavioural deviance and the physician’s conscience was made answerable to administrative hierarchy. His trajectory exemplifies ‘imperfect assimilation’ – the incomplete internalisation of professional norms that simultaneously exposed practitioners to institutional sanction and allowed them to exploit its ambiguities.