The life and travels of the barber-surgeon Johann Peter Oettinger (1666–1746) connect a Central European hinterland, the region of Franconia in southwestern Germany, with the Atlantic slave trade by way of the Dutch West India Company (WIC) and the Brandenburg African Company (BAC). The small town of Kunzelsau, where Oettinger died a respected barber-surgeon in 1746, lies only about ten miles from the tiny village of Orendelsall where he was born, son of a Lutheran pastor, in 1666. But as a young man Oettinger travelled across the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic, and then on to the West Indies and Africa in the course of making that ten-mile journey. Oettinger recorded his travels in a vivid manuscript journal, written from 1682 to 1696, but until now his account was known only through a partial and heavily manipulated retelling, published in 1885–86 by Paul Oettinger (1848– 1934), a Prussian officer and descendant of Johann Peter. Paul Oettinger based his shortened and heavily rewritten ‘edition’ on a clear and apparently accurate 1779 copy of the original manuscript. This copy, by Johann Peter’s grandson, Georg Anton Oettinger (1745–after 1831), was handed down within the Oettinger family until 1982, when it was donated, together with other family papers, to the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preusischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin. There it remained unnoticed by scholars until discovered by the authors during their initial researches in 2010–11. The discovery of this eighteenthcentury manuscript copy of the original journal, titled ‘Reisebeschreibung und Lebenslauf von Johann Peter Oettinger’ (Travel Account and Biography of Johann Peter Oettinger) allows us, for the first time, to truly examine the barber-surgeon's travels in Europe and in the Atlantic world.

Although Johann Peter Oettinger travelled much farther than most other journeymen-surgeons, his travel account belongs to a common genre, the journeyman's diary, which served to document the itineraries of a craftsman’s travels and the masters with whom he had worked.