Medicine and healthcare have always been vitally important while also being consistently contested and reshaped in societies throughout time. The papers in this panel interrogate questions of tradition and change among physicians in sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century Europe, opening a conversation regarding standards within medicine during times of contested thought. Premodern medicine is often characterized as largely static in its adherence to humoral theory, the main exception being the challenges presented by Paracelsian chemical medicine in the sixteenth century. While Paracelsus and his followers have garnered the most attention, there was, in fact, a much wider ongoing effort among physicians across Europe to reinterpret classical medical traditions, using experience as a guide. On the one hand, Renaissance humanism and its commitment to revival of ancient cultural forms encouraged renewed attention to classical Hippocratic and Galenic traditions, alongside the ongoing use of Arabic medical literature. On the other hand, a growing sense of modern society as a distinct break from what came before encouraged physicians to embrace new ideas and practices to fit changing circumstances through careful observation of their patients and the conditions they treated. Throughout the sixteenth century physicians across Europe were discussing “new” diseases (for example the French Pox and the English Sweat) and debating whether illnesses were novel or resurgences of previously known maladies (typhus and diphtheria). Such debates rested on a combination of knowledge of classical texts and observation of current symptoms and patterns of illness, often resulting in blended praxis that simultaneously looked backwards and forwards. At the same time, the religious Reformation encouraged both lay and medical authorities to rethink reliance on traditions, especially in approaches to public healthcare. This interdisciplinary panel’s papers range from examining broad reforms in healthcare to the analysis of how physicians redefined specific diseases or conditions. In this way, these papers open a conversation on the social, religious, and intellectual influences that encouraged physicians to look beyond ancient traditions and to call upon their own experiences as carrying equal or greater weight. In geographical contexts ranging across Spain, Italy, and Germany, these papers reflect on diverse ways physicians worked to affirm their expertise as healers, reshape the role of medicine in society, and establish a discourse to better understand bodily disfunction in a changing world.