Students: Scatterplots And Other Visualizations
Below you will find some visualizations that were created to test hypotheses that we had about the data.
DISTANCE OF ORIGIN
First: With Sennert's growing fame, did he draw more students from further away? The zero-hypothesis that we want to prove wrong would be: The mean distance of students' origins remained the same (or less) during the entire time that Sennert supervised dissertations.
Here is the scatterplot, putting together years and distances of origins. It does not only have us stay with the zero-hypothesis, but suggests a slightly more focused range of student origins around Wittenberg in the last quarter of the chart, which would suggest the complete opposite of what we thought---Sennert's fame grew, but the students came rather from nearer by. How would we explain this? With the war, Wittenberg as a city and university, with other locations being more interesting, with local schools getting better, etc.--what do you think?:
PROFESSIONS
38 of the 107 respondents of Sennert can be traced into professions at specific locations (state: 7/31/2020). Most had more than one profession, and professors were usually (in addition to the medical practitioners mentioned below) at the same times medical practitioners, or town/court/personal physicians. The following diagram shows only one of the professions, the latest known career step on the horizontal axis, the the number of former students in this profession as their last known career step on the vertical axis.
Horizontal Axis: We distinguish six important careers: 1) a medical practitioner; 2) a medical practitioner distinguished as court or town/city physician (and therefore traceable more easily in city or court archives); 3) a personal physician or archiater, usually of a very high ranked person, such as a prince or bishop; 4) a professor at university, gymnasium, or seminary, sometimes in the position of rector or dean of that institution--usually this position was connected to a position of medical practitioner or town/court/personal physician, but we have counted only the professorship here; 5) political positions with the empire or city, such as a counselor, that were often held by people of aristocratic origin; and finally 6) outstanding professions, such as the natural researcher who goes on long expeditions.
Why we decided to construe the hierarchy this way: We have not put into this equation the social group of origin. The former respondents left one position to take over another position, and we visualized only the last position they held.
Vertical Axis: The vertical axis shows how many of Sennert's respondents are traceable in this profession. As alerted to above, most people had more than one position, either one after the other, or simultaneously. The most common two positions held simultaneously were a professorship and a position as medical practitioner (and we counted here only the professorship).
The visualization shows that of the 38 respondents of Sennert, 16 can be traced as professors, three as counselors or similar, and one as natural researcher on expedition as their last known position. Also, twelve respondents were working as medical practitioners, three as town or court physicians and three as personal physician. (While all of the professors were medical practitioners, a few of them were also town or court physicians or personal physicians, which are not counted here.)
To interprete this visualization, we need more information: were there medical studies at other universities/gymnasiums/seminaries opening up, and does the hiring of sixteen of Sennert's students as professors seem surprising seeing other cohorts in the time? What exactly did a medical practicioner do, what a town/city or court physician, and what a personal physician? Was going into politics a side track that had to do with the personal constitution or background of the respondent rather than his medical career? How easiy was it to have a career--what were the single steps that Sennert's respondents took? Did they study at many other universities and only medicine? AND FINALLY: did they use what they learned with Sennert?
Two questions can be answered by another two scatterplots: (1) did the former respondents have overcome a large distance between the location of their last known profession and their home town or (2) their town of study in Wittenberg? An average distance relatively closer to their town of origin (than to their town of study) would suggest they actively searched in this direction for their professional and adult life. The below diagrams (taking on the horizontal axis the dates of first disputation with Sennert as their landmark) suggest exactly this, and to prove this tendency to work close to the origins, we would now need to read more about the single students' lives, make our research qualitative. To make the data visible, we omitted one outlier, a last position as natural researcher in Brazil, 6000 miles from both Wittenberg and the town of origin, Liebstadt in Sachsen. The person in question with this unusual position is Georg Marggrafe, a respondent of Sennert in 1634, who traveled to Brazil als a greographer, cartographier, astronomer and meteorologist.
