In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the number of university-trained physicians in the German lands grew rapidly. They emerged as a new type of professional group prospering—often far away from home—solely based on their training. The preeminent place of medical practice, of the diagnosis and treatment of patients as their principal source of income stands in striking contrast, however, to the learned habitus many physicians cultivated throughout their lives. They were major representatives of the contemporary republic of letters, were in lively epistolary exchange with scholars from other fields, discussing history and archeology, genealogy, or numismatics. Some physicians wrote poems, others conducted mineralogical and zoological studies, or drew plans for fortresses. Since all these activities were rarely rewarding in financial terms, the question arises why the physicians cultivated this learned habitus. Drawing on Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of “self-fashioning”, the paper shows that identity or self-formation and public self-staging were inextricably linked and complemented each other. The manifold activities by which physicians demonstrated their learning and erudition to the outside world reflected, at the same time, a habitus they had acquired over many years, in Latin schools and in the arts course, and which allowed many of them to work, for some time at least, also in non-medical fields, as teachers or private tutors, for example. Only gradually, over the course of the early modern period, the ideal of the experienced, seasoned medical practitioner largely took the place of that of the erudite humanist scholar.