The Pennsylvania State University
The Graduate School
College of the Liberal Arts
THE SECRETS OF HEALTH; VIEWS ON HEALING
FROM THE EVERYDAY LEVEL TO THE PRINTING PRESSES
IN EARLY MODERN VENICE 1500-1650
A Dissertation in
History
by
John Gordon Visconti
@ 2009 John Gordon Visconti
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
August 2009
ii
The dissertation of John Gordon Visconti was reviewed and approved* by the following:
Ronnie Hsia
Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of History
Dissertation Co-Advisor
Chair of Committee
A. Gregg Roeber
Professor of Early Modern History and Religious Studies
Dissertation Co-Advisor
Interim Head of the Department of History
Tijana Krstic
Assistant Professor of Early Modern History
Dissertation Co-Advisor
Melissa W. Wright
Associate Professor in Geography and in the Program of Women's Studies
*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School
iii
Abstract
In early modern Venice, and, to a large extent, the entire European continent, medical
practitioners from a wide variety of social levels shared many similar ideas and common
assumptions about the body, health, sickness and healing. Ideas regarding moderation in
lifestyle, physiological balance within the body, the need to physically eliminate badness from
the sick body, and the significance of temperature, moisture and dryness, can be found in healing
practices across the social spectrum. The idea that the human body and the heavenly cosmos
were divinely linked and that good health depended upon a harmonious relationship with nature
can be found at all different social levels of early modern thought. The main reason for these
similarities is that ideas about such things, even at the most scholarly levels, were intuitively
derived, intellectually plausible, and commonsensical, hence, they occurred to many different
people.
Modern historians of medicine impose artificial distinctions upon early modern healing,
dividing medical practitioners, knowledge, and healing practices up into separate categories for
their own organizational needs. Renaissance medical philosophers did much the same thing.
During the early modern period, scholarly medicine suffered a discursive crisis. In a period of
professional upheaval characterized by the expansion and fragmentation of their field, the major
players in Renaissance universities investigated the past, seeking information by which to affirm
and secure their own scholarly positions at the expense of others. Both then and now, the stories
such people produce oversimplify the rich and complex history of early modern medicine and
pigeon-hole its practitioners into narrow stereotypes.
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Table of Contents
Introduction. Divide and Distinguish: An Anatomy of Historical Writing
on Early Modern European Healing………………………………………………………1
Chapter 1. Scholarly Medicine during the Late Italian Renaissance: Historical
Roots, Tradition and Change…………………………………………………….………28
Chapter 2. Humors, Complexion, Spirits and Energy: The Technical Side of a
Philosophical System; Galenic Medicine during the Late Renaissance..…..…………..108
Chapter 3. The Secrets of a Sixteenth-Century Venetian Woman: Isabella Cortese
and Alchemical Medicine………………………………………………………………169
Chapter 4. Boundaries, Turf Wars, and Scathing Critiques: Various Types
of Medical Practitioners Examine Each Other, 1550-1680………………………….…219
Chapter 5. Regulating the Venetian Medical Marketplace: Charlatans,
Mountebanks, Empirics, and Apothecaries—The Institutions that Governed
Them and the Laws that Policed Them, 1500–1700……………………………….…..290
Conclusion. The Secrets of Health: Early Modern Views on Healing…………………336
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………...….368
v
List of Figures
“The Humoural System”….....................................................................................................136
vi
Abbreviations
ASV
ASP
ASF
BNM
Archivio di Stato di Venezia
Archivio di Stato di Padua
Archivio di Stato di Firenze
Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venezia
b. / bb.
fol.
r.
v.
vol.
busta /e
folio
recto
verso
volume
vii
Acknowledgements
Completing this dissertation required nine years of work. I incurred many debts during
those years. Funds from Penn State University partially offset my research expenses during my
time abroad. Monies from the Josephine B. Weiss endowment and the Sparks scholarship helped
me considerably. But without the support, encouragement, guidance and technical assistance of
approximately two dozen people, this project may never have been completed. I would like to
express my gratitude and appreciation to the teachers, colleagues, classmates, family and friends
that helped me reach the finish line.
No two scholars directly shaped and influenced my academic interests more than Guido
Ruggiero and Ronnie Hsia. After completing an MA degree under his tutelage at the University
of Miami, Guido Ruggiero encouraged me to pursue a doctorate at Penn State. Guido served as
my thesis advisor for three years in Pennsylvania, before moving on to pursue other interests.
Fortunately, Professor Ronnie Hsia willingly took over as my graduate advisor and thesis chair.
During our years together, Dr Hsia provided first-rate mentoring, professional support and
nurturing friendship. I shall always be grateful to both these gentlemen.
Many other scholars contributed to my academic development. The list is long, but I
would like to thank, in no particular order, Melissa Wright, Gregg Roeber, Tijana Krstic,
Federico Barbierato, Stephen Ortega, Robert Proctor, Miriam Bodian, Greg Eghigian, Laura
McGough, Michael Krenn and the late Edward L. Dreyer. My interest in early modern natural
philosophy in general, and the history of healing in particular, was greatly shaped by Katherine
Park, Steven F. Harris and William Eamon. Rebecca Totaro, Mary Fissell and Deborah Harkness
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taught me a great deal about medicine, health and healing during the early modern period.
Jennifer Silver provided invaluable technical support during the construction of my dissertation.
My years of research in Venice were aided immensely by the guidance and teaching of
Professor Federico Barbierato. Federico’s tireless support helped me overcome the linguistic and
paleographical challenges of the Venetian archives. Perhaps more importantly, the friendship
offered by Federico’s family, his parents Mario and Irene Barbierato, his wife Chiara and their
daughter Daria, helped sustain me throughout those years. Much the same can be said for my
friendship with Silvia Ferreti. I will always remember the time we shared together.
I would never have pursued a doctorate without the encouragement and support of my
close friend Stephen Ortega. My interest in early modern European history grew up alongside
Dr. Ortega’s work during the late 1990s. But my personal trials and tribulations with graduate
coursework, archival research and dissertation writing were made more enjoyable by my
dialogue with Stephen throughout the years. In 2002, when a personal problem unrelated to
scholarship threatened my studies, Stephen, Nancy and Ana Ortega provided the friendship and
support necessary to help me weather the storm. My friend Leah Vincent also helped me through
this difficult period. Thank you.
Finally, I would like to thank my family for their unconditional support and unwavering
encouragement. My parents, Frederick and Margaret Visconti, have been a tower of strength
during my fifteen years of graduate school. My wife, Sarah Lawrence, endured many sacrifices
for the sake of my dissertation during our first several years together. In fact, Sarah’s loving
support has been the most important influence on my dissertation. Our daughter, Veronica,
arrived exactly one month prior to my oral defense. Her arrival has been rather inspiring.
1
Introduction
Divide and Distinguish: An Anatomy of Historical Writing
on Early Modern European Healing
This dissertation examines medicine and healing in early modern Venice from 1500
through 1650. Despite its primary focus on Venice, this work will also consider knowledge and
ideas regarding the body, health, and sickness among a wide variety of medical practitioners
throughout early modern Europe. It will examine university-based medicine and neo-scholarly
medical knowledge among amateur healers at the margins of academic society. It will also
consider what previous generations of historians called ‘popular healing,’ or methods of curing
illness among ordinary people, at the everyday level of life and living. Each chapter considers
alleged similarities and differences among various types of prominent healers in early modern
Europe through consultations of contemporary sources. To avoid confusion and distance myself
from a potentially pejorative term, I shall refer to the final category described above not as
‘popular healing,’ but as ‘vernacular healing.’
Although Venice shall be at the center of this investigation, many non-Italian sources
shall also be considered, and much of this work shall touch upon ideas associated with general
western European medicine during the late Renaissance. Venice, in fact, represented something
of a ‘European capital of medicine’ during the early modern period. The Venetian Republic’s
University of Padua, which shall be examined closely in my first two chapters, may have been
Europe’s most influential medical school during the period under consideration. The Republic’s
great rate of commercial activity ensured that most major medicines flowed through Venice’s
borders. In addition, Venice supported a tremendous early modern publishing industry, from
which poured an eclectic source of learned, neo-scholarly, and vernacular literature on medicine,
2
health, and healing. Virtually all of western Europe looked to Venice for innovation within the
field of medicine, while nearly all phenomena related to healing within Europe gained expression
within the vast borders of the Republic. In short, one learns a great deal about early modern
European health and healing when focusing upon the history of medicine in Renaissance Venice.
My first task shall be to describe the various ways historians have recently thought about
Renaissance medicine, how historical writing on the subject has changed, and the forces that
influenced such transformations. After this important bit of table-setting, I shall provide a survey
of scholarly medicine during the late Italian Renaissance. Chapter 1 discusses the historical
roots, traditions, and forces of change affecting university-based medicine during the late
sixteenth century. I contend that during the early modern period, scholarly medicine represented
a bricolage of many different intellectual traditions; a wide variety of disparate ideas, not easily
reconciled with each other, were tenuously held together by broader ideas concerning tradition,
expedience and authority. Medical science taught in late Renaissance universities represented an
amalgam of Aristotelian philosophy, Galenic/Hippocratic medical theory and Thomist theology,
transmitted in a manner heavily influenced by the educational philosophy and pedagogical
methods of scholastic commentary. But Aristotelian philosophy as understood during the
Renaissance only vaguely resembled the ancient Greek master’s original teaching. Galenic
medicine, as shall be thoroughly explained in Chapter 1, represented a strategically conceived
mixing of several different bodies of knowledge, where questions of pragmatism and utility
imposed upon interpretation and development. Implicit within both Aristotelian philosophy, as
conceived during the late Renaissance, and Galenic medical knowledge, as understood in the
sixteenth century, were strands of irreconcilable thought, profoundly troubling contradictions,
and controversial questions.
3
By examining scholarly Renaissance medicine from its ancient roots, down through its
centuries of evolution and transformation, right up until the major controversies which
dominated the period considered in this paper, I hope to develop a critical perspective from
which to consider historical writing on medicine. I argue that during learned medicine’s
discursive crisis in the late Renaissance, the major medical scholars at universities responded in
much the same way modern historians of medicine have done; both generations of scholars reexamined the distant past, seeking information by which to affirm and secure their own
professional positions at the expense of others, producing partial, rhetorical, and reductive
portrayals of western medicine. Both then and now, when faced with a sea-change within their
respective fields (modern historians of medicine, as shall be explained below, have recently
witnessed tremendous change within their discipline), scholars produced partial stories of
medicine’s history, while stereotyping various medical practitioners into overly narrow identity
compartments.
The second chapter carefully analyzes Hippocratic/Galenic medicine, or late-Renaissance
manifestations of ‘humoural theory,’ which, as explained above, occupied the inside track in a
field of competing medical philosophies during the period under consideration. My goal, in part,
shall be to describe and explain the body of knowledge and sets of practices taught in late
Renaissance medical schools. Here, readers will learn of the blood, phlegm, yellow and black
bile of humoural theory. My sources shall include early modern texts, and the ancient texts upon
which they draw, during the Renaissance. A good deal of the chapter shall be devoted to the
technical aspects of a humoural medicine, which actually constituted a total philosophical
system.
But in a larger sense, Chapter 2 represents a history of ideas. This section explores the
4
ideational relationship between Hippocrates’s four humours and the ancient European theories of
matter based on four ‘elements’—air, earth, fire and water—and four ‘principles’—hot, cold,
moist, and dry. The chapter considers the ancient western notion of ‘correspondence,’ often
associated with Hermetic and Neo-Platonic philosophy, and its place within Humoural theory.
The chapter describes how Renaissance medical philosophers combined perceptions of
‘correspondence’ and relationships among the basic conceptual principles within the humoural
model, which were all borrowed from ancient Empedoclean and Aristotelian teachings, to
produce meaning within humoural theory.
In Chapter 2, I shall emphasize the fact that pre-modern views of the body, health, and
healing were not necessarily derived from systematic investigation of the body itself. Humoural
theory, in fact, has always been influenced by a great deal of thought outside purely corporeal
and physiological considerations. Many of the model’s fundamental principles—the virtues it
celebrated, such as ‘balance,’ ‘moderation’ and ‘harmony,’ and the vices it warned against, such
as ‘passion,’ ‘overindulgence’ and ‘disorder’—were reinforced in a wide variety of human
activities. Since many of humoural theory’s basic tenets were intuitively plausible,
commonsensical, and self-evident, they struck a wide variety of people as entirely reasonable.
This constitutes an important reason why so many healers separated by vast spans of space and
time have commonly shared so many ideas.
The style of medicine considered in Chapter 3 would appear, at first glance, to differ
considerably from official Renaissance medicine. The third chapter, in fact, differs significantly
from the first two chapters described above. But before talking about difference and distinction,
it shall be necessary to take a step back and consider how modern scholars typically think about
5
the history of medicine. Perceptions of ‘difference,’ as shall be explained below, seem to be the
operative principle.
The next several sections of this introductory chapter shall consider historical writing on
medicine and healing in early modern Europe. As I shall argue, previous historians seem to have
missed the eerily similar fashion in which early modern people from widely different
backgrounds viewed nature, heaven, the cosmos, and the human body in the context of healing.
It is my contention that fundamental similarities, common assumptions, and shared sets of
practices emerged and endured among healers at the various social levels in Venice throughout
the early modern period.
*
*
*
*
*
Framing consistent theoretical models and establishing meaningful historical criteria for
understanding early modern European healing represents a daunting task. Virtually all early
modern people sought cures for illness. As in the modern world, the basic challenges of
establishing and maintaining health touched nearly every aspect of early modern life. From
Hippocrates right down to contemporary disputes between social and cultural historians, scholars
of medicine have always faced one fundamental challenge: bringing order to a vast array of
unwieldy phenomena. The nature of these organizational challenges has directly shaped the
methodological approaches and theoretical models devised by historians of medicine.
Attempting to organize their historical knowledge, many scholars adopt methods of
compartmentalization, distinguishing approaches to healing and styles of medicinal practice in
order to compare and contrast the similarities and differences among various healers. Doing so
6
necessitates devising organizational concepts such as “medical practitioner” to categorize styles
of healing practices. A heuristic category like “medical practitioner” generally describes the
educational backgrounds, methodological practices, and professional affiliations, among other
things, of a given set of healers. Hence, we read of the university-educated “learned physician,”
the “barber surgeon,” the apothecary, and the self-styled “empiric.”1 Some aspects of this
category, such as educational background, defy concise description. Consequently, the general
metaphysical and epistemological foundations shaping a given healer’s intellectual orientation
become categories themselves. Hence, we learn of “religious healing,” “astrological healing,”
and “natural magicians” who cure illness.2 Categories such as “university-educated learned
physician” and “licensed medical doctor” can only be reified in contradistinction to perceived
opposites; hence, when reading of legitimately sanctioned and legally authorized healers we also
learn of “quacks” and “charlatans.”3 Furthermore, weighty categories like “religious healing”
and “natural magic,” packed with meaning and implications regarding spiritual values and
cosmological beliefs, often include practitioners who came under ecclesiastical review, provoked
scholarly debate, or suffered rigid censorship during the early modern period. Both then and
now, when reading of “natural magic” for the purposes of healing, we learn of “black magic,”
and, inevitably, “witchcraft.” The fact that medicinal practices associated with the categories
discussed above—religious, astrological, and magical healing—varied considerably at different
social levels brings greater complexity to historical reconstructions. The scholarly quest to
accurately describe and characterize healers inevitably results in more labels and categories.
1
The list of relevant examples is long and shall be developed throughout this dissertation. For now, let us consider
French, Medicine before Science: The Business of Medicine from the Middle-Ages to the Enlightenment.
2
Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer. See also Siraisi, The Clock and
the Mirror, and Shumaker, Natural Magic and Modern Science..
3
Porter, Quacks, Fakers & Charlatans in Medicine, and Mirabella, Female Mountebanks and the Negotiation of the
Public Space in Early Modern Europe.
7
Hence, we read of “exorcists,” “cunning women,” and “popular religious healing.”4
These dilemmas of description are not purely the products of poorly conceived historical
theorizing. Many medical practitioners did pursue legal licenses to sanction their legitimacy,
some early modern healers were tried for witchcraft, and some ordained clerics did perform
rituals of exorcism to cure the sick. In fact, many of the labels and categories deployed by
contemporary scholars, like “barber surgeon,” “charlatan,” and “witch,” derive from terms used
during the early modern period. But the point is that the images of early modern healers and
styles of medicinal practice described by contemporary historians have been defined in
opposition to each other and subsequently compared. Faced with the challenge of organizing
inquiries into a vast sea of fundamentally similar yet significantly different sets of practices,
historians have felt compelled to divide and distinguish. Compartments of individual healers and
categories of healing styles have concretized in opposition to each other with perceptions of
difference serving as their principle basis of specificity. Similarities among “different” styles of
healers or shared practices across “distinct” styles of healing serve as fodder for investigations
into matters of “influence,” “cultural transmission,” “diffusion,” “adaptation,” or “syncretism.”
In the pages that follow, I would like to discuss some of the shortcomings that have resulted from
such approaches to historical reconstruction. In order to do so, it shall be necessary to describe
the various ways the history of early modern medicine has been written, how these histories have
changed, and the forces that shaped and molded such transformations.
*
4
*
*
*
*
Gentilcore, Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy, and Nagy, Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-Century
England.
8
“Traditional histories of medicine” may broadly describe the original genre of scholarly
writing within this field. Traditional histories generally describe the lives and scholarship of
medicine’s most influential practitioners and researchers. Here, we learn of Hippocrates (c. 450c. 370 BC), Dioscorides (1st century AD), Galen (AD 129-c. 200), Joannitius (809-877), Rhazes
(865-925), Avicenna (980–1037), Arnald of Villanova (1240-1311), Paracelsus (1493-1541),
Andreas Vesalius (1504–1554), William Harvey (1578-1657), Joan Baptista van Helmont (15791644), and Thomas Sydenham (1624-89), to name a few. “Great men” and “great ideas”
represent the subjects of this literature. Traditional historians of medicine typically trace theories
of the body, health, sickness, and healing practices in the West from their ancient Greek origins,
to their exportation to Muslim lands, their re-importation, translation, and subsequent
development in Europe (beginning roughly in the twelfth century), and their alleged radical
transformation during the period covered in this dissertation. With its emphasis on canonical
writings and the significance of translation, the field is textually driven and heavily influenced by
philological and etymological considerations. These histories construe medical theory as the
product of highly intellectualized debate among scholars, and, like the famous men and
canonical texts they investigate, traditional historians of medicine concentrate more on medical
theory than actual applied medical practices.5
Traditional historians generally view the medical teaching of early modern Christian
European universities as one component of a large educational framework, or a subordinate field
submerged in a constraining theoretical matrix dominated by philosophy and theology. In this
sense, early modern medical theory is understood as a product or manifestation of Christian
5
The list of relevant examples is long and shall be developed throughout this dissertation. For now, let us consider
Bates, ed. Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions, and Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the
Renaissance. See also Siraisi, History, Medicine and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning.
9
thought, rather than an innovative discipline. Viewing medicine as an outgrowth of Christian
logic and natural philosophy, traditional historians typically stress the strong ties that existed
among a variety of early modern discursive formations in their examinations of medicinal theory.
For example, learned astrological medicine viewed the human body as a microcosm of the
universe—an idea prevalent in much early modern natural philosophy. Furthermore, the four
humours of humoral theory—blood, phlegm, red bile, and black bile—relate directly to the four
basic elements of the Aristotelian universe: earth, air, water, and fire. Emphasizing these
relationships allows traditional historians to consider the impact of transformations in natural
philosophy, such as the alleged shift from the Aristotelian three-tiered universe and
hierarchically ordered cosmos to the mechanistic view of nature, on early modern medicinal
theory. In this regard, the story of medicine serves as a crucial theater in the scholarly industry
known as the “scientific revolution.”
When analyzing the evolution of western medicinal theory, traditional historians typically
emphasize the significance of major intellectual trends and their ideological manifestations
during the early modern period. The intellectual movements known as scholasticism and
humanism represent two common examples. Scholasticism and its pedagogical method, which
may be described as a formula for fulfilling Aristotle’s theory of knowledge—the proper
ordering of accepted first principles proceeded by rational argument to demonstrate universally
valid conclusions—represented a reactionary influence on the teaching of early modern
medicine. For scholastics, properly ordered medicinal knowledge conformed to ancient sources,
regardless of the experience of contemporary healers. Humanism may be simply defined as an
early modern style of hermeneutics emphasizing the precise interpretation of language for the
sake of understanding ancient texts. In the early modern period, humanists typically attacked
10
scholastic theory as it related to medicine. For many humanists, scholastics uncritically accepted
sloppy, imperfect translations of ancient texts contaminated by Islamic languages. By
emphasizing such intellectual quarrels, traditional historians often portray early modern
medicinal theory as the product of clashes among competing schools of thought, rather than the
victory of one group of enlightened thinkers over another less informed collection.6
Nevertheless, the master narrative, or grand schema for organizing the interpretation and
writing of most of these histories, has been a story of progress. Detailing the genius of a
relatively small number of scholarly men, traditional historians ultimately reconstruct the genesis
of ideas that yielded greater clarity and more realistic understanding of the human body, health,
sickness, and healing to the most learned levels of early modern society. Interpreting the past
with regards to the present, traditional histories tend to seek those strands of early modern
thought presumably constituting the “origins” of modern medical theory.7 Hence, although as
linguistically rich, detailed, and engaging as the genius they describe, many traditional histories
of medicine seem vulnerable to Butterfield’s critique of whiggish interpretation.8
Social historians of medicine have concentrated more on medicinal practices and
methods of healing and less on the theoretical underpinnings of learned medicine than their
colleagues who write traditional histories. Many social histories attempt to determine what
particular styles of healing were commonly practiced at specific levels of a given social order.
Whether examining epidemics, spiritually informed public rituals dedicated to health, or the
organization and dissemination of state sponsored medical services within a given community,
social histories emphasize the significance of social relationships in health-related phenomena.
6
McVaugh and Siraisi, eds., Renaissance Medical Learning: Evolution of a Tradition.
Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind.
8
Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield warned that historical reconstructions must not
interpret the past with regard to the present. For Butterfield, history should not be viewed as a series of victories or
blunders along the high road of progress to the glorious present.
7
11
Social historians tend to organize inquiries into medicinal practices along hierarchically
ordered models of social class. Such investigations often focus on the institutions into which
certain medical practitioners organized themselves, such as the guild, corporation, or “society.”
The rules, regulations, and governing principles within such institutions often describe medicinal
practices and approaches to healing. In addition, the social and economic backgrounds of the
members of these groups, to the extent that they may be discerned, may shed light on the types of
healing practices deployed at specific levels of the social order.
Closely related to the institutions organized by medical practitioners to advance their
collective interests are the corresponding legal structures empowered to police healing practices,
such as the health magistracy, the board of health, or the church. Many social histories of
medicine rely heavily on such bodies for sources. In much of early modern Europe, state
institutions such as London’s “College of Physicians,” Venice’s “Collegio degli Medici,” or
Bologna’s “Protomedicato,” were assigned, from time to time, the right to license medical
practitioners and oversee medicinal practices. In the early modern French cities of Paris and
Montpellier, the faculties of medicine at the major universities were empowered to examine and
license all medical practitioners within their borders. In fact, all of these institutions grew out of
universities. For example, Bologna’s “Protomedicato” was the judicial arm of the city’s College
of Medicine.9 Examining the statutory law, legal proceedings, trial cases, and political culture of
these institutions, social historians attempt to shed light on perceptions of healing and the
medicinal practices, including those deemed acceptable and those prohibited by legal authorities,
among healers examined by these bodies.
The underlying assumption framing social histories of medicine is that healing takes
place within social contexts, hence, must be understood sociologically. Social historians of
9
See Pomata, La promessa di guarigione.
12
medicine may consider the theoretical components of a given medical tradition, but their stories
will ultimately detail the appropriation and adaptation of that tradition within the structures,
institutions, social relationships, and ways of life within a given community. Since social
historians of medicine tend to search for various styles of healing at different social levels, it is
fair to say that these scholars think of medicinal theory in plural terms. At first glance, this would
seem to represent a crucial difference between traditional and social histories of medicine—
while the former’s exclusive concentration on the “official medicine” of university essentially
made scholarly medicine synonymous with “medicinal theory,” the latter’s insertion of medicinal
theory into the social order produced a contextual notion of medical history. If the traditional
scholar’s history of early modern medicine resembled a path to the present, the social historian’s
untidy collection of countless stories seemed to have no particular direction.
Nevertheless, upon closer examination, it seems that until fairly recently, social historians
were heavily influenced by the approaches to historical writing established by the traditional
school. Social historians analyzed the values, beliefs, assumptions, and general knowledge of
various medical practitioners against the larger backdrop of learned, university-based, medicinal
theory. For sources, as indicated above, these scholars consulted legal codes, professional
associations, state institutions, and contemporary publications on early modern medicine.
Whether examining a university-based institution co-opted into a state judicial system or the
legal rhetoric composing a local guild’s charter, social historians consistently dwelled in a
labyrinth of official, political, and propagandistic sources. Even attempts to concentrate on
theoretically non-learned medical practitioners such as the “self-styled empiric” remained partial
when the technical criteria deployed to identify such practitioners relied on legal codes,
educational attainment, and professional affiliations. With “official medicine,” or university-
13
sanctioned, learned medicinal theory, serving as the backdrop against which all healing methods
were ultimately understood, healing at the everyday level of early modern life was inevitably
portrayed as a pale emulation or watered-down version of “high culture.”10
The dichotomous image of two opposing medical worlds, one composed of universityeducated, licensed, and legitimate practitioners of “official” medicine and the other consisting of
the uneducated amateur, quack, or charlatan, which seems to have existed since the earliest
histories of medicine, remained the basic framework for most scholarly writing on healing right
up until the 1960s.11 About forty years ago, however, more social historians began to study
medicine, and transformations in social history, which shall be described below, changed the
way they wrote about healing. Broadly speaking, two main trends began to emerge—one style
maintained the dichotomy of “elite” versus “popular” (a term fashionable at the time but
disregarded now) medicine, but argued that views on healing at the everyday level represented
more than just poor imitations of learned medicine; views on healing among ordinary folks had a
genesis, origin, and evolutionary history quite distinct from the beliefs and practices of
university-trained physicians. The second school argued that a much broader collection of
individuals actually engaged in the activities previously thought to be the domain of the learned
physician; the apothecary and the barber surgeon gave medical advice, the herbalist sold medical
remedies, the astrologer and magician, both learned and without formal education, saw clients
strictly for the purpose of curing their illnesses; hence, the boundaries once thought to separate
10
Gentilcore, Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy; Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern
France; and Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London.
11
The popularity of this “high-low” framework gained more attention among social historians with the publication
of Carlo Ginzburg’s Il formaggio ed I vermi: il cosmo di un mugnaio del ‘500 (1976), translated into English and
published in 1980 as The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. The book detailed the
story of a miller tried by the Inquisition for heretical views regarding the origin of the universe. Although
interpretations varied, for many, Ginzburg seemed to argue that the cosmological views of an ordinary miller
represented more than a watered-down view of official religion and learned theology. This type of analysis was
readily mapped onto a wide variety of topics in social and cultural history, both in Europe and the United States.
14
levels of medical practice were more fluid than previously believed. By 1987, W. F. Bynum and
Roy Porter were able to confidently suggest that “the frontiers between orthodox and unorthodox
medicine have [always] been flexible….So mobile have been their boundaries, that one age’s
quackery has often become another’s orthodoxy.”12 As Mary Lindemann noted, this idea implied
that the views on healing possessed by the apothecary, surgeon, charlatan, cunning woman,
“quack,” and university-trained physician might not have differed all that much.13
The first school’s point of view dovetailed neatly with contemporary trends in the larger
history of science. As Steven Shapin pointed out, during this period, many historians of early
modern natural philosophy began to investigate the concrete human practices by which ideas or
concepts were constructed. “What do people do when they make or confirm an observation,
prove a theorem, or perform an experiment?” became a crucial question.14 The history of science
as a history of concept-making practices encouraged scholars to investigate the wide variety of
ways people of different social levels produced knowledge. The view of the scientific revolution
as consisting primarily of a series of highly intellectualized theoretical debates among scholars
came under fire. According to the new views, a wide variety of voices informed debate in early
modern natural philosophy. The artisan’s technical skills, the inventor’s knack for practicality,
the homemaker’s folkloric recipe, all participated, at one time or another, in the same giant
project—working on nature to improve the human condition.15
The second school’s point of view, with its emphasis on the broader collection of
individuals involved in early modern healing activities, also helped open the door for the wider
variety of scholars interested in the history of medicine. But unlike the first school’s interest in
12
Bynum and Porter, eds., Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy, 1.
Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 194.
14
Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, 4.
15
This point of view is emphasized in William Eamon’s Science and the Secrets of Nature. Many of Eamon’s
sources and documents deal with aspects of healing.
13
15
all those “players,” for lack of a more precise term, who contributed to the actual construction of
medicinal knowledge and healing practices, the second school investigated healing activities as
cultural phenomena, emphasizing a variety of new perspectives and raising a plethora of new
questions in the process. For example, anthropologists of medicine investigated the multiple
roles and perspectives of the patient and sufferer in healing activities.16 Feminist historians
studied midwifery to shed light on early modern gender relationships and the sexual division of
labor within medical practices.17 Historians of science dedicated to extending the definition of
the social influences upon the production of scientific knowledge (such scholars are sometimes
called “externalists”) began to reconstruct stories of medicine and healing, emphasizing the push
and pull of religious, political, and economic interests upon early modern medical practitioners.
In short, in its social, cultural, and practical aspects, medicinal and healing practices gained
newfound appreciation among historians of early modern Europe. By the 1970s, many historians
felt that studying perceptions of the body, health, sickness, and healing might reveal a great deal
about life and living in the early modern period. As more social historians began to study
sickness and health, medicine and healing as historical categories became subsumed into social
history. Histories of medicine became subjected to larger forces of change within the historical
profession. Indeed, the radical transformations within social history during the later part of the
twentieth century produced new critical perspectives among scholars within the field, many of
whom cast doubt on the value of all previous histories of medicine.
*
*
*
*
*
Virtually every scholarly work on early modern medicine written in the last two decades
16
17
Porter, ed., Patients and Practitioners.
Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men.
16
argues that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe did not suffer a poor ratio of medical
practitioners to everyday citizens. Despite misconceptions to the contrary, Renaissance Europe
suffered no dearth of healers. More extensive research, new types of questions, and expanded
conceptions of therapeutic practices have uncovered the previously unappreciated healers. In
recent years, scholars have taken up the task of organizing their historical knowledge about the
newly discovered medical practitioners.18
Consulting diaries of midwives, memoirs of gravely ill people, inquisition records of
heretical healers, treatises on magic and witchcraft, recipe books of folkloric remedies, and
advertisements of non-learned healers takes historians in different directions, where little or no
common ground exists with which to construct general conclusions about early modern
medicine.19 On the other hand, consulting the legal codes of institutions designed to police
medical practice, examining the regulations of structures used to organize various medical
practitioners, and reading the published works of early modern learned physicians critiquing
contemporary medical practices, allows historians to more neatly distinguish approaches to
healing during the Renaissance.20 The challenge of bringing order to a vast array of disparate
phenomena encourages historians of medicine to concentrate on the latter group of sources.
Distinguishing approaches to healing and styles of medicinal practice in order to compare
and contrast the similarities and differences among various healers has emerged as the
operational strategy among historians of medicine. Nouns such as “boundaries” and verbs such
as “separate,” “distinguish,” and “discern” appear frequently in such histories, as scholars
attempt to “draw lines” among medical practitioners.
18
Fissell, Patients, Power and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol.
There are many examples. For now, let us consider Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage and
Power at the End of the Renaissance.
20
Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy; Garcia-Ballester, Medical Licensing and Learning in
Fourteenth-Century Valencia, Pomata, La promessa di guarigione.
19
17
Consider the analytical disposition revealed in the language of William Eamon’s
discussion of late sixteenth-century sickness and healing:
Since the line between demonic possession and diseases of natural origin was often
difficult to draw, exorcists and physicians vied over contested jurisdictions. This
ambiguity of social roles and professional identities made it possible for popular healers
to appropriate the role of exorcist, and for exorcists to play the role of doctor.21
The desire to establish boundaries based on perceived differences may be more keenly
appreciated in the work of David Gentilcore. In describing early seventeenth-century licensed
physicians in Italy, Gentilcore explains:
Physicians were specialists of internal medicine, but avoided all manual activities.
There was a tendency for physicians to define themselves in terms of what they were
not and what they did not do. There were not apothecaries or surgeons, whose art was
mechanical and whose knowledge was acquired by apprenticeship or, in the case of
some surgeons, training at hospitals. And physicians were most certainly not empirics,
though the public may not always have been aware of the distinction.22
Interestingly, Gentilcore’s conclusions regarding the early seventeenth century do not fit
neatly with Nancy Siraisi’s observations regarding thirteenth-, fourteenth-, and fifteenth-century
Italian medicine. Siraisi argues that in late medieval times and the earliest stages of the
21
22
Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 189.
Gentilcore, Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy, 58. Italics appear in original text.
18
Renaissance, “the separation of medicine and surgery seems to have been least marked in Italy.”
The professional separation between medicine and surgery became sharp and strongly
enforced in northern Europe, where craft surgical traditions and the academic study of
medicine appear to have grown up much more independently of one another than was
the case in Italy.23
Degrees of separation notwithstanding, the point is that Eamon, Gentilcore, and Siraisi all
seek to divide and distinguish medical practitioners and healing practices. If we skip ahead to the
eighteenth century, we find that Mary Lindemann deploys the same analytical disposition for a
survey of European healing, even if she complains about the difficulty in doing so:
Overall, it appears that people in the eighteenth century were less willing than their
ancestors to attribute their problems to spells, cures, or the evil eye, or were unwilling
to do so publicly. Indeed, if they continued to consult magicians or cunning-men and
women (who were now much thinner on the ground because of significant changes in
village structures and the increasing involvement of central governments in local
affairs), they carefully avoided mentioning it. Sympathetic cures remained more
popular, but the boundaries between magical and the natural here are exceedingly
difficult to discern.24
The research of Siraisi, Gentilcore, and Lindemann relies heavily on legal codes,
23
24
Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine, 178-79.
Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 21.
19
government regulations, and the official sanctioning of medical practitioners. Many recent
histories of medicine, in fact, deal with the regulation of commerce within the medical
marketplace. In the case of early modern Venice, Michelle Laughran, John Henderson, and
Richard Palmer, among others, have examined the policing and legal regulation of drugs and
remedies. Consulting the Public Health Office (Provveditori alla Sanita), the College of
Physicians (Collegio Dei Medici), and the College of Apothecaries (Collegio Degli Spezieri),
these scholars examine the licensing of people to sell drugs, the sanctioning of patents for
specific remedies, and the prosecution of unlicensed medical practitioners. These historians
attempt to demonstrate how various players below the level of licensed physicians, such as
apothecaries or self-styled empirics, tried to solidify their standing within the social, political,
and economic order of Venetian society.25 They also attempt to neatly categorize healers into
tidy compartments of historical identity. Their research, methodology, and style of analysis has
been structural, quantitative, and positivistic. Gentilcore has established a “Charlatan’s
Database” which lists 1,596 licenses issued to 1,075 different charlatans over 250 years of the
early modern period. Quite simply, for Gentilcore, a “charlatan” is someone with a “charlatan’s
license.”
In the fifth chapter of this dissertation, I examine the Venetian Republic’s attempt to
police medical commerce and healing activities. “Regulating the Venetian Medical Marketplace:
Charlatans, Mountebanks, Empirics and Apothecaries—The Institutions that Governed Them
and the Laws that Policed Them, 1500-1700” describes the Republic’s attempt to control an ever
25
See the following works by David Gentilcore: Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy; “Apothecaries,
Charlatans, and the Medical Marketplace in Italy, 1400-1700;” and “For the Protection of Those Who Have Both
Shop and Home in this City.” See also Palmer, “Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice;” Gentilcore, "Charlatans,
Mountebanks, and Other Similar People;” Katritzky, "Marketing Medicine: The Image of the Early Modern
Mountebank;" and Marchini, ed., I mali e I rimedi della Serenissima and Le leggi di sanita della Repubblica di
Venezia.
20
expanding medical marketplace. I focus upon the non-learned healers lacking university degrees,
but the chapter sheds light upon the activities associated with a variety of healers across the
Venetian social spectrum. The view gleaned from the perspective of state regulation provides an
important conceptual lens from which to consider the various healing practices used to cure early
modern illness. But my chapter fundamentally differs from the recent histories described above.
Briefly, I suggest that most of the commercial exchange within the early modern
Venetian medical marketplace took place outside the state apparatus of legal oversight and
beyond the scrutiny of public regulation. In Renaissance Venice, a much greater variety of drugs,
remedies, and healing prescriptions existed than can be understood by surveys of statutory law.
Hence, unlike the studies described above, my chapter emphasizes the limits of studying state
regulation and legal policing of early modern medicine. The studies of an early modern Health
Office might give us an idea of the political objectives, administrative goals, and medical
fantasies of a Renaissance legal institution. If we consult other relevant sources in conjunction
with these records, however, and consider the political culture in which these laws were
conceived, different images of early modern healing seem to emerge. Reflections of Renaissance
urban dwellers, reviews of non-scholarly medical publications, and studies of early modern
popular culture raise questions not easily reconciled with pronouncements of statuary law.
Acknowledging the limits of documentary evidence left by legal institutions may help us avoid
the tendency to impose overly structural conceptualizations of healing back onto the early
modern period. The world of Renaissance medicine and the sum total of early modern healing
practices bear little resemblance to the stated goals and legal ideals of a typical sixteenth- or
seventeenth-century European Health Office. By emphasizing the political culture of early
modern patronage society and its influence on the state regulation of the medical marketplace, I
21
open the door to new perspectives on healing practices among the various social levels of
Venetian society.
Historians need not rely upon statutory law, legal records of state regulation, and the
charters of guilds and corporations to investigate the various levels of healing practices within
early modern Europe. Licensed doctors and university professors published explicit critiques of
contemporary medical practice throughout the Renaissance. For example, in 1578 Laurent
Joubert, the chancellor of the University of Montpellier’s Faculty of Medicine, issued a critique
of medicinal practices among non-learned healers entitled Erreurs populaires. Joubert’s polemic,
which emphasized the differences between professional scholarly medicine and amateur practice,
represented the start of an interesting trend. Indeed, the professor from Montpellier encouraged
licensed physicians throughout Europe to record errors among untrained healers for the purposes
of waging medical war. Over the next several generations, scholarly physicians responded,
publishing critiques of fraudulent practice among amateur healers while underscoring the
exclusive legitimacy of university-trained doctors. These ideological attacks represented the selfpromotional rhetoric of a professional class seeking to advance their interests at the expense of
their competition.
But enemies of official medicine also wrote books. Neo-scholarly healers, with some
university training but no degree, often attacked their former mentors. Authors of self-help
medical books, remedy vendors, disgruntled professors, and subversive intellectuals complained
about the tyranny of professional medicine and the misguided ways of scholarly doctors. Hence,
a great deal of information may be gleaned about the various types of Renaissance healers by
looking directly at the books they published about each other.
The fourth chapter of this dissertation considers such sources. “Boundaries, Turf Wars
22
and Scathing Critiques: Various Types of Medical Practitioners Examine Each Other, 15501680” analyzes some of the similarities and differences among prominent Renaissance healers by
going straight to contemporary testimony. I use a variety of printed texts to uncover the basic
assumptions, common sets of therapeutic practice, and popular remedies deployed by healers at
the various social levels of early modern society. The self-promotional rhetoric and ideological
critiques exchanged by certain healers are examined to shed light upon the differences said to
exist between the various camps of medical practitioners. But like my section on state regulation,
this chapter emphasizes the limits of the documentary evidence at hand.
My concern is that uncritical reading of sources like Laurent Joubert’s Erreurs populaires
does more harm than good. The purely dichotomous, binary arrangement of Joubert’s medical
world into two distinct camps—official, sanctioned, scholarly medicine versus illegitimate,
fraudulent, unqualified quackery—affords historians the tightly formatted, readily discernible
conceptual frameworks they think they need to organize their knowledge about the past.
Unfortunately, such readings and styles of analysis ignore more than they consider and
ultimately encourage us to oversimplify the complexity of early modern healing practices. In
Chapter 4, I encourage historians to analyze Joubert’s text as a rhetorical construction. Similarly,
I suggest that contemporary reactions to Joubert’s diatribe be read through the lens of the literary
critic. If we take the sweeping rejection of scholarly medicine by vernacular healers at face
value, we fail to appreciate all those areas in which such men and women did proceed from
university-based perceptions, unconsciously or otherwise, regarding health and healing. The
chapter attempts to critically examine how modern historians typically think about early modern
European medicine.
The third chapter of this dissertation carefully examines a healer who seems to reside
23
between the poles of scholarly and quack. Chapter 3, “The Secrets of a Sixteenth-Century
Venetian Woman: Isabella Cortese and Alchemical Medicine,” features a close reading of an
obscure sixteenth-century natural philosopher. By carefully analyzing the metaphysical,
epistemological, and ontological foundations of Cortese’s work, I try to gain insights regarding
the major influences on her natural philosophy. Through a critical reading of Cortese’s
biographical passages, I contemplate the social, cultural, political, and economic factors that may
have pulled her work in certain directions. I conclude that Cortese remained heavily influenced
by some aspects of learned alchemical medical philosophy. My chapter demonstrates how
strands of Hermetic, Neo-Platonic, and Paracelsian thought appear throughout Cortese’s work.
But this Venetian woman’s theories never conform to any coherent, systematic medical ideology.
The eclectic nature of Cortese’s text has strong epistemological implications for early
modern healing. Unrestrained by reconciliation with any unifying theory, Cortese remained free
to consider ideas from a wide range of sources and to use them however she saw fit. This seems
to be a distinguishing quality among neo-scholarly Renaissance natural philosophers. However, I
suggest one overarching idea did seem rather important to Isabella Cortese. The notion that
nature, or the universe, heavens, and stars, somehow existed in a meaningful relationship with
the human body, represents a fairly consistent theme in Cortese’s medical literature. In this
dissertation, I suggest that various interpretations of the Neo-Platonic microcosm/macrocosm
theory, which held that the human body represented a miniaturized emulation of the heavenly
cosmos, influenced healers at every level of early modern European society. This crucial idea, as
shall be explained over the next several chapters, represented one of many fundamental
similarities among healers from various educational backgrounds, social class, and cultural
contexts.
24
As a natural philosopher and early modern healer, Isabella Cortese defies neat
categorization. But people have tried. The sixteenth-century critic Tommaso Garzoni, as shall be
described in Chapter 3, called her one of the “professori de’ secreti.” Four hundred years later,
the “professors of secrets” still receive a healthy amount of scholarly attention from European
and American historians of natural philosophy. This dissertation carefully examines several of
these natural philosophers, although collectively dubbing them a “group” or a “school” imposes
an artificial coherence upon the past. Nevertheless, a few words about the “professors of secrets”
shall be necessary here.
During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a flood of books, commonly known
as “i libri di secreti,” flowed from Venetian printing presses. The “books of secrets” tended to
consist of annotated recipes, formulas, methods and techniques for solving problems in everyday
life. Many of these books concerned the body, sickness, health, and healing. They were generally
written by amateur natural philosophers who had some advanced education or formal training
with a specific art, such as medicine, alchemy, or astronomy, but were not necessarily recognized
as authorities within their fields. The “professors of secrets” rarely obtained positions in royal
courts, university appointments, or work in academies of learning. For example, professors of
secrets writing about healing were often former medical students who had never gained licenses
to practice medicine.
Many of “i libri di secreti” contain an interesting blend of neo-scholarly erudition and
artisanal practicality. Much contemporary scholarship on this literary tradition, if we may call it a
tradition, assumes that the contents of these volumes made their way down the social scale, into
everyday culture and ordinary society. In his influential work Science and the Secrets of Nature:
Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, William Eamon implies that the
25
professors of secrets demystified the artisanal techniques of non-learned empirical healers,
making their methods more intelligible to more people, including scholars and aristocrats higher
up on the social scale. Once the university-educated students of natural philosophy came to
understand the nuts and bolts of the technician’s tricks, physicians, surgeons, alchemists,
astronomers, and the like came to believe that vast groups of people were actually working on
the same project—the investigation and exploitation of nature to solve human problems.26
Thinkers associated with the “professors of secrets” remain a conundrum for historians
interested in stereotyping the natural philosophers of the past. For that reason, several such
figures have drawn my attention. The lives and work of Leonardo Fioravanti (1518-1588),
Girolamo Ruscelli (1500-1566), Giambattista Della Porta (1535-1615), and, of course, Isabella
Cortese shall be discussed throughout most of this dissertation. The significance of a group that
defies categorization resides at the heart of this thesis.
*
*
*
*
*
This dissertation has been written in two parts. The first part, which basically includes the
first two chapters, represents a history of ideas regarding scholarly medicine. These sections
consider the epistemological and metaphysical components of university based medicine during
the late Renaissance. In a sense, the first part of this paper concerns the theoretical side of premodern European medicine. But ‘Part One’ also constitutes a sketch of the historical evolution of
a learned tradition. Perhaps the most important overarching idea within the first part of this
dissertation can be summed up as follows: the way medical history has been written in the past
resembles and affects the way we write about the history of medicine today.
26
Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature.
26
If Part One represents the theoretical side of a learned tradition, the second part of this
dissertation concerns the practical side of early modern European medicine. The final chapters of
this paper consider applied medicine, healing practices, and the experiences of medical
practitioners within social contexts. More specifically, the second half of this dissertation focuses
upon vernacular rather than scholarly healing.
In the final sections of this paper, I have attempted to understand healing in previous
centuries the way a modern medical anthropologist would understand healing today. My goal has
been to listen more closely than previous historians of medicine. I have tried to move away from
a style of writing influenced by the conceptual and discursive qualities of medicine as a science.
Instead, I have focused upon the political culture in which healing phenomena unfolded. I have
tried to read medical publications the way a literary critic would read modern texts, as rhetorical
constructions, rather than historical representations of an unambiguous past. In short, I have tried
to understand the human phenomena of healing, rather than the art of medicine, in all its social
and cultural manifestations.
Unfortunately, the gap between the history of medicine as an intellectual discipline on the
one hand, and stories about healing on the other, can be rather formidable. In Chapter 2, readers
will learn how scholarly medicine’s curious relationship between ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’
studies represented a controversial subject during the late Renaissance. Contemporary critics
blasted humoural medicine for the glaring inconsistencies between its theoretical foundation and
its practical application. Searching for solutions, sixteenth-century historians of medicine
discovered the dilemma had ancient roots. The problem also has modern manifestations.
In fact, the distinction between and relationships among scholarly physicians and
vernacular healers remains a loaded question in historical writing on the Renaissance. Until fairly
27
recently, as described above, the history of medicine, as a field, concentrated on the learned
medicine of universities. When ‘social histories of medicine’ grew out of ‘traditional histories of
medicine,’ a shift in historical writing occurred. Since social historians emphasized the different
styles of medical practice at various social levels, their work challenged the correspondence
between learned theoretical medicine and applied therapeutics. In a sense, the history of
medicine expanded into the history of healing.
But this expansion can lead to unwieldy historical writing. These organizational
challenges have influenced historians to divide, distinguish, and categorize knowledge and
practitioners in reductive fashion. In the process, a wide range of fundamental similarities,
common assumptions, and shared sets of healing practices among people separated by vast spans
of space and time have been obscured.
28
Chapter One
Scholarly Medicine during the Late Italian Renaissance:
Historical Roots, Tradition and Change
Let us imagine, for the sake of narrative, a young man leaving his native Venice to
embark upon a program of medical training at the University of Padua. The year is 1566.
Giacomo Baldini is twenty-four years old. During the final preparations for his departure, the
young man receives a letter from his father. “Work earnestly,” implores the elder man, “and
never neglect any aspect of your studies.” Baldini’s father expresses concern for his son’s
“effortless resettlement” and hopes there will be “no problems regarding his establishment” in
the region of Padua. Given the Venetian Republic’s annexation of Padua in 1405 and the strict
oversight Venice imposed upon the University’s school of medicine, the young man’s transition
to his new home would probably be uneventful. Sorting out the precise details of the new
medical student’s first year curriculum, however, would be anything but simple. In the sixteenth
century, the University of Padua’s school of medicine experienced a period of significant
transformation.1
No record of Giacomo Baldini’s academic record exists. Nevertheless, we may safely
assume the young Venetian’s studies included the following: (1) Christianized Aristotelian logic,
(2) a thorough examination of the “Hippocratic/Galenic system” of medicine, or “humoral
theory,” which shall be examined in detail in the following chapter, (3) a consideration of Arabic
medical learning, almost certainly centered on the Canon of Avicenna, (4) astrology and its
1
The University of Padua began to seriously organize its approach to medical education around 1260. See Siraisi,
Arts and Science at Padua, 23. The Venetian Republic started treating the University of Padua like the Empire’s
official medical school in the late fifteenth century, while the Venetian Senate began selecting professors and
organizing curriculum following the War of Cambrai around 1517. See Bylebyl, “The School of Padua,” 342-343.
See also Randall, “The Development of the Scientific Method at the School of Padua,” 177-206.
29
implications regarding health and healing, and (5) physiology and anatomical dissection. If the
first year medical student could not function in Latin, he would have to master the language on
the fly.2 But in any language, Baldini could not be blamed if he found the instructional methods
of his mentors confusing, for in the latter part of the sixteenth-century the European university
system experienced a period of pedagogical transition. The medieval system of disputatious
exhibition, characterized by two or more scholars engaged in vigorous debate largely for the
benefit of an audience of students, gradually lost ground to the demonstrative methods of
instruction more closely associated with the modern university system. In some courses, teaching
methods relied upon active student participation, observation and experimentation for the
purposes of learning. Diverse pedagogical methods—dialectical, authoritarian, textual,
observational, participatory and experimental—both complemented and competed with each
other in the early modern European medical school. Methods of instruction seem to have varied
from course to course and from year to year.3
But one thing did not change: the sources consulted were generally quite old. Ancient
texts served as the foundation of early modern medical education. In this sense, medical school
during the Renaissance possessed an academically conservative, reactionary orientation. The
medical university passed along well-established, time-honored traditions of learning. By the
sixteenth century, most of the major concepts and therapeutic methods derived from such ideas
taught in European medical schools had been originally conceived at least 1300 years before.
2
In the Paduan University system students had to study the liberal arts and classic languages for at least three years
in order to qualify as bachelors of science and to progress to the stage of actually learning some medicine. Hence,
Baldini must have studied Latin prior to embarking upon his medical education. Nevertheless, in the medical
program, he would be expected to master texts translated entirely into Latin and often composed in esoteric,
complex language. See Bylebyl, “The School of Padua,” 335-370.
3
See Siraisi, Medicine and the Italian Universities, especially the Introduction, 1-11; “Medical Scholasticism and
the Historian,” 140-157; and “Renaissance Readers and Avicenna’s Organization of Medical Knowledge,” 203-206.
Carefully conceived verbal exchange among experts for the benefit of an audience of students was often called
“agonistic debate.” See also Pedersen, “Tradition and Innovation,” 451-488.
30
Organized “debate” concerning assigned reading, if we may call it debate, generally served to
highlight major ideas in selected ancient texts. Even anatomical dissection was less investigative
and more demonstrative in its pedagogical purpose; while the surgeon hacked away, the
professor directed attention to the evidence supporting ideas outlined in the distant past.4
Nevertheless, within the larger context of reverence for ancient learning, seeds of change
were growing. Like the pedagogical philosophy and educational methodology of Renaissance
universities, the very content of medical knowledge taught in early modern schools was
transforming in the late sixteenth century. Essential components of traditionally held medical
belief came under fire during these years. Firstly, late sixteenth-century medical philosophers
began offering a wider variety of interpretations regarding the canonical texts upon which
Renaissance medicine depended. Much of the cohesiveness and consensus of opinion among
previous generations of scholars dissolved in the new climate of debate and dispute which
characterized professorial discourse during the late Renaissance. Secondly, new trends within
literary criticism encouraged many scholars to look critically at the refurbished texts circulating
in early modern universities. “Humanists,” as shall be more fully described below, argued that
ancient Greek and Roman medical teachings had been contaminated or hopelessly altered by the
series of linguistic translations accompanying their exportation to eastern Arabic lands shortly
after the decline of the Roman Empire and their subsequent re-importation by western Europeans
in the later part of the medieval period. Thirdly, many sixteenth-century medical philosophers
began to argue that learned European medicine was overly dependent upon logic, too theoretical,
too subtle and insufficiently empirical to have any meaningful value. Finally, under fire from a
wide variety of scholarly attacks, the Aristotelian tradition, the intellectual system upon which
Renaissance natural philosophy depended for its most basic models of logical theorizing, began
4
Park, “The Criminal and the Saintly Body,” 7.
31
to come apart. In 1566, first-year medical student Giacomo Baldini might well have appreciated
a general outline and introductory discussion of these issues prior to his first class. Such a
discussion shall be attempted in this chapter, over four centuries later.
*
*
*
*
*
How can we best understand the body of knowledge implied by the phrase “learned early
modern European medicine”? What corpora of learning did Renaissance medical students
actually study at university? What were the sources of this knowledge? How were early modern
students taught to process the information presented in their medical courses? Which
philosophies of education and theories of knowledge prevailed in Renaissance universities? How
can we characterize the major debates, divisions, and points of controversy among medical
philosophers within early modern medical schools?
Properly answering these questions requires historical contextualization. This chapter
provides a concise survey of how scholarly medicine during the late Renaissance actually took
shape. In the pages that follow I shall offer a general outline of learned, official, university-based
early modern medicine from its ancient roots, down through its centuries of evolution and
transformation, right up until the major controversies surrounding humoural theory echoed
through the classroom walls of Giacomo Baldini’s day. Against the backdrop of this broad
survey, a critical perspective from which to consider all those questions raised above may
emerge.
As most students of Western Civilization know, the basis of learned early modern
European medicine was Greek in origin. In fact, late medieval views of physical phenomena,
nature, and the cosmos were graphically altered by the rediscovery or re-importation of ancient
32
Greek philosophy by western European scholars in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries.
Aristotelian logic, Socratic and Platonic philosophy, Ptolemaic astronomy, and Euclidean
geometry, to name a few modes of knowledge construction, provided the theoretical frameworks
for Renaissance epistemology, cosmology, and physics. A newfound appreciation for ancient
Greek medicine, which had been neglected in Europe for centuries, emerged around the same
time and had a significant influence on Renaissance education as well.
Medical treatises constitute some of the oldest surviving examples of Greek scientific
writing.5 Plato and Aristotle mention a learned man named Hippocrates who taught medicine for
a fee and wrote books on the subject of healing.6 Tradition places his birth in 460 B.C. Most
historians of medicine agree that the major written works attributed to Hippocrates were
produced between 430 and 330 B.C. Hence, we know subsequent generations of learned men
organized, compiled, and synthesized Hippocratic works while probably writing under the pen
name of Hippocrates. The most comprehensive volume of Hippocratic teachings contained in a
single text may be found in a work entitled Aphorisms.7 But the more complete range of
Hippocratic writings, or the Hippocratic corpus, seems to be a collection of early Greek medical
manuscripts organized and named by a librarian from Alexandria. The collection itself is quite
possibly the remains of an ancient medical library.8
Long regarded as the “Father of Western Medicine,” Hippocrates stands in relation to the
science of healing as Ptolemy does to the science of astronomy. Both men were far from accurate
in much of their fundamental thinking, but they approached their subjects systematically, and
5
Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 1. Historian of medicine Noga Arikha goes so far as to say that
“the art of medicine and philosophy were born at the same time.” See Arikha, Passions and Tempers, 6.
6
Lloyd, ed., Hippocratic Writings, 9.
7
See Keller’s Introduction to Hippocrates’ The Theory and Practice of Medicine.
8
French, Medicine before Science, 10. Approximately sixty treatises attributed to Hippocrates date from the late
fifth or early fourth century BC.
33
their work provided frameworks for rigorous study among future generations. The Hippocratic
collection provides the earliest written examples of meticulously recorded observations,
descriptions of patient testimony, and the compilation of data gleaned from collective
experiences. The Hippocratic project of recording and organizing information gleaned from
rigorous observation raised the possibility of systematic physiological theorizing. Previous forms
of healing, or at least previous recorded forms, were entirely spiritual or religious in orientation.
Religious healing would continue to flourish in ancient times and beyond, but Hippocratic
approaches to understanding illness marked the birth of “rational medicine.”9
By moving perceptions of the body, health, sickness, and healing outside the purely
spiritual or supernatural realm, Hippocrates placed medicine on the mantle of a rational, logical,
organized approach to knowledge construction. Just as the ancient Greek philosopher
Empedocles attempted to organize ideas regarding the physical world around concepts of four
elements, so Hippocrates established a conceptual basis for understanding the body based upon
the idea of four basic bodily fluids.10 Humoural theory and the four humours—blood, phlegm,
black bile and yellow bile—became the cornerstone of Hippocratic medicine.
In Hippocratic medical philosophy, a “humour” (compositione) may be best understood
as a physiological concoction of fluid particular to the living organism to which it belongs;
humours represent the specific bodily fluids essential to the physical functioning of an organism.
The status, nature, and quality of interaction among the bodily humours governed an organism’s
9
As shall be discussed below, catchwords like “rational” or phrases like “rational doctor” can be dangerous in the
history of medicine. “Rational medicine” can easily mean different things to different scholars. For now, “rational
doctor” is meant to imply a healer who views the body as a thing to be examined; for the rational doctor, bodily
processes are governed by a readily understandable logic that can be empirically appreciated. Furthermore, the
rational doctor believes the body can and will respond to physical and material intervention. The label becomes less
tidy and more complex when we consider the rationalist’s faith in empirically derived experience as compared to his
use of philosophical logic. Most traditional historians of medicine use this question to divide “rationalists” into
several competing camps.
10
Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic, 4.
34
health. This gave medicine something of a mechanical basis; health could be sustained by
maintaining the balance of the four basic bodily fluids.11 For Hippocrates, the body represented a
microcosm of the cosmos. The natural state of proper health mirrored the harmony of a wellordered universe. Moderation in all things—rest, exercise, nutritional intake—and a properly
ordered lifestyle maintained the harmonious balance necessary to sustain the natural state of
health.12 Humoural theory gained acceptance and popularity, thanks, in no small part, to the
career of Galen of Pergamon.
Born in Hellenistic Greece, Galen (c. AD 129-200) became physician to the young
Commodus, son of Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and something of a modern day “Surgeon
General” of the Roman Empire. In his address to the Venetian College of Physicians four
hundred years after Galen’s death, Fabius Paulinus described the ancient Greek scholar as
“Prince of the Physicians, second only to Hippocrates.”13 Galen spent much of his professional
life gathering medical treatises, synthesizing the teachings of others, and publishing edited
commentaries of Hippocratic works, most notably the Aphorisms, which Galen considered
essential. With this work, Galen claimed to be “perfecting medicine,” and his emphasis on theory
aided the movement towards a conceptualization of medicine in terms of specific books.14 By
AD 500 in the Greek city of Alexandria, there existed a standard syllabus of Hippocratic texts
(mostly those celebrated by Galen) and a Galenic canon, which came to be known as “the 16
11
Humoural theory shall be examined in much closer detail in chap. 2 of this dissertation. For a brief discussion of
Hippocratic influence on the fundamental aspects of humoural theory described above, see Ball, The Devil’s Doctor,
52-53.
12
See Nutton, “Medicine in the Greek World,” 11-33, especially 23.
13
Address by Fabius Paulinus to the Venetian College of Physicians, printed in Galeni Opera ex nona lutarum
Editione, xvi-xvii.
14
Nutton, “From Galen to Galenism,” 81. See also Nutton, Ancient Medicine, especially “The Life and Career of
Galen,” 216-230, and “Galenic Medicine,” 230-248.
35
books.”15
Galen may have sought legitimacy via Hippocratic association. The Pergamonian
physician often attributed his ideas to Hippocratic texts and justified his methods with
Hippocratic reasoning. Although Galen amended much of Hippocrates’ writings and issued
debatable interpretations of many Hippocratic principles, he insisted upon the supremacy of
Hippocratic doctrine throughout his life. “Hippocrates was the first known to us of all those who
have been both physicians and philosophers,” wrote Galen in AD 191. “I do not know that any
one could add anything wiser than what has been said by Hippocrates,” he later concluded.16 As
Galen’s career matured and a core of basic themes emerged in his writings, an image of a
medical man took shape; to quote Roger French, “Galen was the Rational Doctor: the body was
capable of being understood and responded to intervention.”17 Hippocratic inspiration had
transformed into Galenic conviction.
But the five hundred years that separated the death of Hippocrates from the birth of Galen
included the life of Aristotle (384-322 BC). During Galen’s scholarly career, much academic
thought conformed to systems of logic, methods of deductive reasoning, and formulas for
argument fashioned by Plato’s most famous student. Viewed by many as the “Father of Western
Philosophy,” Aristotle’s basic epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological views directly
influenced Galen’s medical teaching.18 Almost 1500 years later, when Giacomo Baldini would
have entered the medical school at Padua, thoroughly transformed Galenic thought cloaked in a
15
The Galenic Canon, or “the 16 books,” are listed as follows: 1) On sects, 2) Art of medicine, 3) Short book on the
pulse, 4) Method of healing, 5) Collection I: Anatomy for beginners, On bones, On muscles, Collection II: The
books of causes and symptoms, 10) On affected places, 11) Collection III: The 16 books on the pulse, 12) On the
difference between fevers, 13) On crises, 14) On critical days, 15) Method of healing, 16) On the preservation of
health.
16
Galen, On the Natural Faculties, bk. 1, 13:175. The second part of the quotation is taken from bk. 2, 8: 193. See
Hutchins, ed., Hippocrates and Galen: Great Books of the Western World.
17
French, Medicine before Science, 41.
18
Barnes, Aristotle, 1. See also Walsh, “Galen’s Writings and Influence Inspiring Them.”
36
revised Christian Aristotelianism would enjoy the inside track in a field of competing medical
philosophies.
Aristotle might not have recognized the sixteenth-century medicinal discourse
encountered by Giacomo Baldini, but the ancient Greek master’s interest and curiosity would
have been aroused. Aristotle was, in a sense, a medical man. His interests in biology led him to
investigate and contemplate the human body, health, sickness and healing. But he was also a
botanist, zoologist, mathematician, political scientist, legal scholar, and psychologist, who wrote
about logic and the arts and sciences. As a scholar-philosopher-teacher, Aristotle believed the art
of medicine to be a subset of natural philosophy. The view held strong down through the ages of
learned western medicine.
As a natural philosopher, Aristotle outlined schema for the objects of scientific inquiry
and the methods by which fruitful investigation may proceed. Aristotelian philosophy prescribed
rigorous epistemological models for the processes of reasoning, demonstration, and verification.
For Aristotle, the purpose of science was to show the connection between an object and its cause.
Showing the connection between the “that” and the “why,” as we shall see below, is what
Aristotle termed “demonstration.”
Like Empedocles and Hippocrates before him, Aristotle liked sets of principles that came
in fours. Much Aristotelian inquiry proceeded from his theory of the four causes: material,
formal, efficient, and final. Every existing object possessed a “material cause,” which is the
matter from which it is composed. For Aristotle, it is impossible to say “what a thing is,” without
asking, “What brought this thing into being?” Hence, the material cause of an object produces
the question, “Out of what has the thing come?” The “formal cause” referred to the discernible
form that defines the object. “What is the object?” became the question most closely associated
37
with the formal cause. The “efficient cause” referred to the agent that produced the transition
from material to formal. But inquiries into the formal cause of an object also produce the
question, “What is the object meant to be?” The “final cause” concerned the purpose for which
such action was completed.19 These conceptual principles would greatly influence how learned
medical men thought about the human body in the early Christian era and throughout the late
medieval and early modern period.
If we jump ahead to Giacomo Baldini’s first semester at Padua in 1566, we see the
Aristotelian influence in the earliest pages of a required text. In Book I, Chapter 2 of Avicenna’s
Canon, we find the following under the heading “The Subject of Medicine”:
Since medicine considers the human body from the standpoint of how it is made
healthy and how it sickens, and since we can have knowledge of neither unless it is
known through its causes, we must in medicine know the causes of health and sickness.
Now as health and sickness and their causes are sometimes evident to the senses and
sometimes only perceived by means of evidence afforded by the various symptoms, we
must in medicine gain a knowledge of the symptoms of health and sickness. It is a
dictum of the exact sciences that knowledge of a thing is attained only through a
knowledge of the causes and the origins of the causes. Consequently, our knowledge of
health and sickness cannot be complete without an understanding both of symptoms
and of the principles of being. There are four kinds of cause: material, efficient, formal
and final.20
19
Aristotle, Metaphysics. For a helpful overview and summation of the points described above, see Irwin, Aristotle’s
First Principles, chap. 1.
20
Gruner, A Treatise on the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna, Incorporating a Translation of the First Book. 716. In
late sixteenth-century Paduan medicine, Avicenna’s Canon generally served as a tool with which to convey Galenic
38
Hence, the significance of Aristotelian philosophy on Renaissance medicine owes much
to Aristotle’s influence on Galen in the second century AD.21 If Galenic medicine found its
inspiration in Hippocrates, its intellectual and philosophical grounding was moored in an
Aristotelian framework. Galenic perceptions of the body, health, sickness, and healing flowed
from an Aristotelian view of nature. Perhaps most importantly for the story of learned western
medicine, Galen derived his methods of reasoning, deduction, and verification from Aristotelian
methods of knowledge construction.
This part of the story—the relationship between Hippocratic/Galenic medical theory and
knowledge construction in the Aristotelian vein—cannot be underestimated. Hence, while it is
beyond the scope of this dissertation to provide a comprehensive analysis of Aristotelian logic, a
modest treatment shall be necessary here. After all, Aristotelianism arguably represents the
dominant intellectual system for the development of natural philosophy in Western history. But
there is something more. Aristotelian logic and philosophy, as understood during the early
modern period, experienced a long and complex historical evolution from its original conception
to its deployment in Renaissance universities. Questions regarding the nature of that historical
evolution constituted major controversies at the University of Padua’s medical school during the
sixteenth century.
*
*
*
*
*
Aristotle’s attempt to develop a systematic theory of knowledge represents the earliest
formal study of “logic” in western civilization. But the earliest significant influence of
Humoural theory. The Arabic text should not be confused as an alternative to Galenic/Hippocratic medical teaching
in this context.
21
Walsh, “Galen’s Writings and Influence Inspiring Them.”
39
Aristotelian logic upon western thought remains debatable. We know that Aristotle left an
extensive body of literature after his death in 322 BC. The Aristotelian corpus, in fact, seems to
have consisted of two basic parts: one popular and one technical. The popular treatises, which
seem to have been published during Aristotle’s lifetime, often consisted of “dialogues,” and
pleasing narratives, free of complex language and technical jargon. Blessed with a certain
literary elegance, these publications were apparently widely read until their ultimate loss toward
the end of antiquity (circa 6th century AD). Aristotle’s technical writings essentially represented
a collection of lecture courses delivered at the “Lyceum” he founded in Athens. These
publications were characterized by closely reasoned arguments, systematic theorizing, and
detailed presentation of information. Some historians consider these technical treatises to
represent an encyclopedic collection of the philosophical and scientific knowledge available
during Aristotle’s day. In fact, the availability of such technical treatises may have been limited
to a few academic libraries, for exclusive consultation by advanced students.22
Shortly after Aristotle’s death, philosophers and students combined several of his
treatises under the title Organon (“Instrument”), suggesting this compilation comprised
Aristotelian logical theory. The list included volumes entitled: a) Categories, b) On
Interpretation, c) Prior Analytics, d) Posterior Analytics, e) Topics, and d) On Sophistical
Refutations. Western styles of inductive and deductive reasoning seem to have been gleaned
from selective readings of Interpretation, Prior Analytics, and Posterior Analytics. But direct
influence of works like On Politics, Rhetoric, and Ethics may be detected in a wide variety of
medieval and early modern natural philosophy as well, and these works were not published and
significantly disseminated until many generations after the Organon. In fact, it is safe to say that
Aristotle’s most famous works, or the “Aristotelian Corpus” as we know it, was not published
22
See Houghton, Scientific Periodicals: Their Historical Development, especially chap. 1.
40
until the 1st century BC.23
Whether fully published and widely disseminated shortly after Aristotle’s death or 250
years after the Greek philosopher’s demise, it is generally thought that the Arisotelian corpus
exerted little influence outside the Lyceum. Hence, most historians conclude that the Aristotelian
tradition represented one among several competing schools of philosophy in ancient times. In
fact, by the 3rd century AD, Aristotelianism had disappeared entirely as an independent school.
(Neo-Platonism, an intellectual system synthesizing Platonic and Aristotelian theory, rose to
prominence from the 3rd century to the 6th century AD and indirectly kept certain ideas within the
original Aristotelian corpus alive. Neo-Platonic interpretations of Aristotle’s original works
represented the core of Aristotelian natural philosophy studied by medieval European scholars
many centuries later).24
In retrospect, the tremendous significance eventually assigned to Aristotelian literature
and Aristotle’s place within the history of philosophy were not necessarily reflected in the
earliest reactions to the ancient Greek’s work. In fact, we may legitimately ask if Aristotle, the
“Father of Western Philosophy,” had ever intended to construct a comprehensive theory of logic
with which to outflank all competing schools of thought.25 After all, Aristotle would not have
referred to his style of logic as a “method.” For Aristotle, every investigation had its own
particular subject matter, and different types of investigations necessitated different methods of
procedure. Nevertheless, subsequent generations of philosophers identified theories of
knowledge construction consistently found in the ancient Greek master’s literature and
23
Taylor, Aristotle.
See Losee, A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, chap. 1.
25
For these ideas I am indebted to my former professor Steven F. Harris. Dr Harris’s course on the Scientific
Revolution provided the framework and direction for much of these pages, and I sincerely hope his book, tentatively
entitled Establishing Consensus on the Constitution of Legitimate Knowledge in Early Modern Natural Philosophy
will be published one day.
24
41
determined them to be distinctly Aristotelian. Entire generations of western medical students
would be reared within the “Aristotelian tradition,” regardless of Aristotle’s original intentions.26
The difference between the original Aristotelian corpus and “Aristotelianism,” as it took shape in
medieval and early modern Europe, represents a crucial story in the history of learned western
medicine and shall be discussed throughout the following several sections of this chapter.
Explaining how interpretations of Aristotle’s original publications evolved into Renaissance
notions of “Aristotelianism,” however, necessitates a more detailed examination of logical
theorization in the early Aristotelian vein.
What Aristotle described as “analytics,” later generations of scholars dubbed “logic.” The
word “analysis” means to divide or “break up.” Hence, the analytic implies dividing an argument
into its various fundamental parts and examining them separately. After identifying the various
fundamental parts of an argument, the thinker considers their relationship to each other. This
brings a certain mathematical element to thought processes; the thinker reasons by the addition
and subtraction of concepts within a sequence of ideas. In a sense, what Aristotelian theory did
for logic and the construction of knowledge, Hippocratic humoural theory did for medicine and
perceptions of health—they both put their subjects on something of a mechanical basis.
Aristotle divided the subject of investigation into two parts: the process of discovery and
the task of demonstration.27 “Discovery,” in the Aristotelian mode, generally consists of
empirical investigation of the subject matter. What observations can be gleaned about the object
of our attention? The investigator uses the four senses (Aristotelian logic emphasized seeing,
hearing, touching, and smelling), takes measurements, records variations, in short, collects any
data that may be relevant.
26
27
See Grant, Aristotelianism and the Longevity of the Medieval World View.
Jancar, The Philosophy of Aristotle, 35.
42
But how does one determine relevance? For the first time, reason enters into the
equation. The investigator determines which sets of characteristics, features, or observations
about the object of inquiry merit individual attention. For Aristotle, no general model for such
determination is possible; procedure depends upon the particular subject matter under
consideration. In the case of learned medicine, subsequent generations of medical philosophers
would outline the relevant characteristics, features, and types of observations worthy of note in
common forms of sickness. Hence, following Galen’s lead, medieval and early modern medical
scholars would “teach” the art of medicine, but they would do so within Aristotelian models of
logic.
Aristotle taught that as lists of noteworthy observations take shape, the possibility of
arranging sequential thought arises in the thinker’s mind. How can one determine the validity of
any thought sequence? Aristotle suggested the concept of “syllogism.” The “syllogistic”
represents Aristotle’s most glorified achievement as a logician. Syllogistic logic, in the
Aristotelian style, would produce the most influential theories of inference and deduction in
scholarly medicine during the Renaissance.28
Aristotle formally described many syllogisms. The following represents a working
definition of the most basic kind: A syllogism is a formulation of words or ideas, in which, when
certain suppositions are made, something other than what was originally supposed necessarily
follows from the comparison, interaction, or combination of the original words or ideas. The
most famous and simplest syllogism is: When “A” equals “B” and “B” equals “C,” then “A”
equals “C.”29
The great heuristic potential of the syllogism is that it expresses the relation of the terms
28
29
See Schmitt, Aristotle in the Renaissance. See also Kefler, “The Transformation of Aristotelianism,” 137-147.
Allan, The Philosophy of Aristotle, chap. 1.
43
with which we reason to one another without referring to any particular subject matter. The
characters “A,” “B,” and “C” can conceivably be anything. No matter what these letters
represent, the thought sequence will retain its validity, so long as one keeps “A,” “B,” and “C” in
their proper place. Aristotle elaborated upon his syllogistic theory, identifying types of
syllogisms (such as “assertions”), types of sentences (such as “simple” or “compound”), and
types of effect various sentences have (such as “affirmation,” “denial,” or “contradiction”). For
another simple but telling example, let us consider the notion of “deduction” (sullogismos).
Aristotle writes:
A deduction is speech in which, certain things having been supposed, something
different from those supposed results of necessity because of their being so.30
Each of the “things supposed” represents a premise (protasis) of the argument. The
conclusion (sumperasma) may be considered the “results of necessity.” Again, to cite a famous
example, “A” results of necessity from “B” and “C” if it would be impossible for “A” to be false
when “B” and “C” remain true.
As described above, by employing the variables “A,” “B,” and “C,” Aristotle divided the
process of thought into several different parts, allowing the investigator the possibility of
developing sequential relationships among the various components of the thought in question.
But in making observations, collecting facts and gathering ideas, how can the thinker gain a
sense of what aspects under consideration actually govern the relationships at hand? How does
the observer begin to understand which sets of facts within a certain context drive the dynamic,
ultimately influencing all the other facts?
30
See Aristotle, Prior Analytics, 18-20.
44
Aristotle taught that valid thinking requires the establishment of “common ground”
among the facts under consideration. He called this common ground “first principles” (archai).
For Aristotle, first principles represent universal, self-evident truths. Aristotle’s first principles
represent a priori axioms, whose irrefutable self-evident truth, upon first sight, renders further
proof unnecessary.31
Crucially, the “self-evident” nature of first principle truth depends upon observation and
experience. Scientifically gleaned knowledge is true or valid because it is based on readily
discernible, objective experience. If a first principle is rendered unrealistic because it is
contradicted by experienced reality, it cannot be a valid first principle. The investigator must reobserve, re-record, and test the new set of ideas over again. This became a basic principle of
scientific experiment in western civilization. It also opened the door for late Renaissance critics
to claim that scholarly medicine was insufficiently empirical.
But two thousand years separated the “empiricists’ ”critique of scholarly medicine during
Giacomo Baldini’s day from the original conception of Aristotelian logic. Sixteenth-century
criticism of Aristotelian influence within scholarly medicine must wait for the pages below. For
now, it shall be necessary to explain Aristotle’s prescription for the relationship between first
principles and larger theorization.
For Aristotle, the principle ultimately governing the facts will emerge if one makes all the
relevant observations, identifies all the irrefutable facts, considers all the possible combinations
of factors possible, and returns to considerations of irreversible truth. A common example
concerns lunar eclipses. First, the investigator observes that on occasion, the moon emits no
light. After experiencing enough eclipses, some basic ideas take shape: a) some heavenly bodies
31
Irwin, Aristotle’s First Principles, chap. 1. See also Allan, The Philosophy of Aristotle, 33-34. In the history of
western natural philosophy, “first principles” have often been conflated with “general principles.”
45
do not generate their own light, b) the sun can shine light onto naturally unlit bodies, c) when
something comes between the sun and a naturally unlit body, the unlit body loses its light. We
notice that the moon has no light one night. Therefore, the moon must not generate its own light.
From earth, we can see the moon and we can see the sun. We hypothesize that the earth resides
between the sun and the moon. In this example, the thinker has reasoned from a particular fact, to
a first principle (the universal truth that “some heavenly bodies do not generate their own light”),
back to the particular fact, establishing a new hypothesis (the earth must be blocking the sun’s
light from the moon; therefore the earth resides between the sun and the moon) in the process.
The scientific syllogism consists in reasoning from fact to principle back to fact.32
In the case of the lunar eclipse, the scientific syllogism represents a “demonstration”
(apodeixis). Aristotle defined “demonstration” as “a deduction that produces knowledge.” In
Posterior Analytics, Aristotle outlined his theory of valid demonstrations and their role in
knowledge production. As described above, for Aristotle, the “demonstration” showed the
connection between the “that” and the “why.”
In the balance of Posterior Analytics, Aristotle outlined his description of scientific
knowledge. We have scientific knowledge, according to Aristotle, when we know: “the cause
why the thing is, that is, the cause of this, and that this cannot be otherwise.”33 Hence, scientific
knowledge is the knowledge of causes. In addition, only what is necessarily the case can be
known scientifically.34
Such ideas would be as relevant to Giacomo Baldini’s medical education as the blood,
32
See Jancar, The Philosophy of Aristotle, 38-39.
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 1.2.
34
Aristotle’s most concise remarks concerning scientia, episteme, the nature of scientific knowledge and related
ideas, can be found in Posterior Analytics, 1; Metaphysics, i. I-2, 980b21-83a23; and Nichomachean Ethics, vi. 311, 1139b14-43b17. To summarize, scientia refers to ‘certain’ or ‘absolute’ knowledge about a distinctly defined
subject, usually achieved by rational demonstrations based upon generally accepted premises (“first principles”) and
leading to universally valid conclusions.
33
46
phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile of Hippocratic theory. But the “Aristotelian logic” Giacomo
Baldini would have encountered in 1566 would significantly differ from the theories of
knowledge originally published in Posterior Analytics.
*
*
*
*
*
Twenty centuries after Aristotle’s death and 1500 years after Galen’s demise, medical
philosophers at Padua vigorously debated the nature of the relationship between Aristotelian
philosophy and humoural theory. Had the shortcomings of Hippocratic teaching been reformed
via reconciliation with Aristotelian logic and philosophy? Or had Hippocratic/Galenic theory
been hammered into Aristotelian frameworks, with little or no regard for the purely medicinal
side of such knowledge? Few agreed.
The best way to approach these basic questions, albeit superficially, might be to take a
step back and broadly view the merger, integration, and relationship between these two sets of
ideas (Aristotelian logic on the one hand, and Hippocratic medical theory as treated by Galen, on
the other). Let us consider two basic aspects of the integration between Hippocratic and
Aristotelian theory as interpreted and subsequently developed by Galen.
On one hand, we must acknowledge the fact that Galen articulated and elaborated upon
Hippocratic teachings within an Aristotelian paradigmatic framework. Galen explained his
interpretation of Hippocratic knowledge against the backdrop of the Aristotelian universe. The
Aristotelian cosmos was a finite, closed, unique material sphere completely filled with matter.
Beyond the eighth, or stellar, sphere, nothing existed. Seven enormous concentric crystalline
spheres carried the planets around in their orbits. At the very center of the cosmos lay our planet,
composed of the four elements of earth, water, air and fire. Combinations of these elements
47
composed all things within the world. Variations between things on earth could best be
appreciated by their relative differences concerning heat, cold, dryness, and moisture. The
moon’s orbit formed the line, or sphere, of demarcation separating the changeless perfection of
the celestial region from the changing and imperfect terrestrial region. On this grand
cosmological stage, Galen “explained” Hippocratic teaching regarding the relationship between
the human body and the cosmos. Galen wrapped Hippocratic teaching in Aristotelian packaging.
This point of view seems most persuasive when we dwell upon one basic fact: Galen’s
affinity for Aristotelian philosophy transcended purely medicinal ideas. Aristotelian thought
appealed to Galen on metaphysical terms. For example, Aristotle’s conception of causation
rested on the assumption of purpose in the universe. For Aristotle, an enduring logic governed
nature. The physical world, natural phenomena and the patterns of the universe were imbued
with meaning and tended toward an end. For Aristotle, nature possessed a symmetry in which
every object—every mineral, plant and animal—has a definite role in the great chain of being.35
Similarly, Galen’s “rational medicine” evolved in a purposeful universe. For Galen, the objects
of nature—every mineral, plant and animal—possessed a definitive structure, purpose, and role
that could be understood and utilized by men. The intractability and pre-existence of matter
inherent in Aristotelian thought rested at the heart of Galenic medical philosophy.36 Hippocrates
35
Gutek, “Aristotle, Founder of Realism,” 35.
See Lloyd, Methods and Problems in Greek Science, especially “The Invention of Nature,” 417-434. Lloyd
suggests the ancient Greek development of a theory of nature, or the view that conceives the physical world and the
cosmos as ontological entities suitable for empirically driven analysis, constitutes a crucial point of departure for the
major ancient Greek philosophical traditions. Once “nature” is perceived as a phenomenon with a set of dynamics
that can be readily understood, new styles of thinking that do not depend upon revelation for foundational
knowledge emerge. Lloyd suggests that Aristotelian philosophy represented the most important of these traditions
and the Aristotelian treatment of nature the most influential. If one accepts this point of view, then it is the
Aristotelian influence, rather than the Hippocratic one, that first puts medicine on a rational basis. I have my doubts,
considering that Hippocrates did outline a theory of microcosm/macrocosm, which perceived the human body in
direct relationship with nature and the cosmos. What is indisputable, however, is that Aristotle outlined a more
complex, developed, and comprehensive theory of nature, the cosmos, and the laws governing physical phenomena
than Hippocrates ever did.
36
48
had said comparatively little about such things.37
On the other hand, it is only fair to point out that Aristotelian philosophy and logic
represented a conceptual language with which to advance ideas while Hippocratic medical theory
essentially represented a body of knowledge about sickness, health and healing. Aristotelian
theories of inferential and deductive knowledge construction, as we have seen in the previous
section and will further explore in the following, provided methods for uncovering truths,
locating answers and developing ideas. Seen in this light, the relationship between the two sets of
teachings described above seems less a victory of one over the other and more the proper
integration of the two. This particular view undermines the idea that Renaissance medicine
represented a philosophical system in and of itself. Instead, Galen shrewdly used Aristotelian
logic and philosophy to rationalize, justify, legitimize and develop Hippocratic theory.
Roger French has boldly written that “Galen had drawn his doctrine from Hippocrates,
[but] in a sense, his whole medical programme was to find Aristotelian rationality under
Hippocratic medical wisdom.” According to French, Galen’s “Good Story of the Rational and
Learned Doctor” rested on the very fundamentals of the Aristotelian world picture. “The whole
purpose of Galen’s treatment of Hippocrates,” wrote French, “was to supply the physical reasons
that lay behind the great man’s medical wisdom.”38 But that does not mean Galen thought more
seriously about Aristotelian philosophy than Hippocratic theory. It only means Galen chose
Aristotelian philosophy to frame Hippocratic teaching and Aristotelian logic to articulate and
develop Hippocratic ideas. In this sense, Galen built the edifice of Humoural (Hippocratic)
medicine with Aristotelian adobe rather than Platonic plaster or Socratic straw.
Galen explicitly addressed his relationships with Hippocrates and Aristotle in writing. If
37
38
See Neuberger, “An Historical Survey of the Concept of Nature,” 16-28.
French, Medicine before Science, 54.
49
we go directly to the printed sources, we can gain a bit of leverage on the questions raised above.
In many instances, Galen implied that “Aristotelian thought” originated with Hippocratic
teaching. In other instances, Galen suggested that Aristotle improved upon ideas originally
conceived by Hippocrates. For example, in Book Two of On the Natural Faculties, Galen writes,
Anyone acquainted with the writings of Aristotle, they will appear to him to consist of
commentaries on the Nature-lore [physiology; natural philosophy as it relates to
medicine] of Hippocrates—according to which the principles of heat, cold, dryness and
moisture act upon and are acted upon by one another, the hot principle being the most
active, and the cold coming next to it in power; all this was stated in the first place by
Hippocrates and secondly by Aristotle.39
Later, in the same volume, Galen adds:
People seem to me to have read none of Aristotle’s writings, but to have heard from
others how great an authority he was on “Nature”…[but] the nature-lore of Aristotle is
shown by an enumeration of the aforesaid doctrines, which emanated first from
Hippocrates, secondly from Aristotle and thirdly from the Stoics.40
In other areas of the text, however, Galen’s position on the subject shifts. Aristotle
becomes more than just a Hippocratic emulator; Aristotle transforms into a seasoned authority
that improves upon Hippocratic ideas, for example:
39
40
Galen, On the Natural Faculties, bk. 2, fol. 3-4.
Ibid.
50
I will show that these opinions were shared by Hippocrates, who lived much earlier
than Aristotle. In fact, of all those known to us who have been both physicians and
philosophers, Hippocrates was the first who took in hand to demonstrate that there are,
in all, four mutually interacting qualities, and that to the operation of these is due the
genesis and destruction of all things that come into and pass out of being. Nay, more;
Hippocrates was also the first to recognize that all these qualities undergo an intimate
mingling with one another; and at least the beginnings of the proofs to which Aristotle
later set his hand are to be found in the writings of Hippocrates.41
Even more to the point, toward the conclusion of Book II, Galen declares:
The origin of diseases and the discovery of remedies, were correctly stated first by
Hippocrates of all writers whom we know, and were in the second place correctly
expounded upon by Aristotle.42
But if we look beyond Galen’s explicit declarations regarding the relationship between
Hippocrates and Aristotle and simply analyze Galenic medical treatises with this question in
mind, a certain undeniable essence emerges: Galen reconciled Hippocratic medical teaching with
Aristotelian natural philosophy. Even a facile understanding of Aristotle permits one to hear the
ancient Greek’s voice in much Galenic literature. It is worth quoting at length Galen’s discussion
of animal conception, fetal growth, and birth, in order to appreciate the clear influence of
Aristotelian natural philosophy:
41
42
Galen, On the Natural Faculties, bk. 1, fol. 2.
Galen, On the Natural Faculties, bk. 2, fol. 3-4.
51
The effects of Nature, then, while the animal is being formed in the womb, are all the
different parts of its body; three activities correspond to these effects, namely Genesis,
Growth, and Nutrition. Genesis is not a simple activity of Nature, but is compounded of
alteration and of shaping. Bone, nerve, veins, and all other tissues may come into
existence, the underlying substance from which the animal springs must be altered; one
would be justified in calling this substance which undergoes alteration the material of
the animal, just as wood is the material of a ship and wax the material of an image.
Genesis results from alteration together with shaping. The seed having been cast
into the womb or into the earth, for there is no difference in the universe,43 then, after a
certain period, a great number of parts become constituted in the substance which is
being generated; these differ as regards moisture, dryness, coldness and warmth, and in
all the other qualities which naturally derive therefrom. Many philosophers and
physicians refer ‘action’ to the Warm and the Cold, and subordinate to these, as
‘passive,’ the Dry and the Moist; Aristotle, in fact, was the first who attempted to bring
back the causes of the various special activities to these principles….
Any sort of scientific consideration to the question of genesis and destruction
requires these derivative qualities. After these qualities come the tangible distinctions,
after them those which appeal to taste, smell, and sight. Tangible distinctions are
hardness and softness, viscosity, friability, lightness, heaviness, density, rarity,
smoothness, roughness, thickness and thinness; all such things have been duly
mentioned by Aristotle.
We know those distinctions which appeal to taste, smell and sight. If we wish to
43
Aristotle makes this point in his De Generatione Animalium I, chap. 1, fol. 17.
52
know which alternative faculties are primary and elementary, they are moisture,
dryness, coldness, and warmth, and if we wish to know which ones arise from the
combination of these, they will be found, in each animal, to be a number corresponding
to that animal’s sensible elements. The name ‘sensible elements’ is given to all the
homogeneous parts of the body, and these are to be detected not by any system, but by
personal and careful observation.44
Indeed, Hippocratic medical teaching, as interpreted, organized and consolidated by
Galen, is drenched with Aristotelian natural philosophy. The same can be said, to varying
degrees, of Ptolemaic astronomy and Euclidean mathematics. In antiquity, the various theaters of
investigation—those things scholars later called “disciplines”—all represented subsets of natural
philosophy. Hence, all such theaters required reconciliation with a master narrative or grand
articulation of the physical world and its governing principles. Aristotelian natural philosophy, as
compiled, organized and published by his students, represented a unifying set of ideas and a
comprehensive explanation of the world’s structure and operation. Galen would not be the last to
make good use of it.
Nevertheless, although extensive, Aristotle’s biological treatises could not provide the
basis for a total system of medical philosophy. Hippocratic teaching held greater potential for
such a thing. Galen tied Hippocratic literature to a common source material, the corpus of
treatises attributed to Aristotle, providing a certain epistemological and metaphysical legitimacy
to Hippocratic teaching in the process. But further work remained to be done in order to establish
“rational medicine.”
Aristotelian and Hippocratic literature combined did not specifically address all the issues
44
Galen, On the Natural Faculties, bk. 1, 2-6.
53
and challenges faced by healers during Galen’s lifetime. The sum total of Aristotelian
publications, however, provided an impressive range of useful problems and, with a bit of
selective interpretation, a potentially useful set of methods for discussing these problems. With a
certain amount of implicit flexibility, Aristotelian logic could be used to expand Hippocratic
teaching beyond its original parameters. Justified by reconciliation with Aristotelian natural
philosophy, Hippocratic teaching would grow through its processing within Aristotelian methods
of logic. Galen would orchestrate this colossal synthesis and development.
Ironically, by the time Giacomo Baldini would begin studying medicine, many critics
would charge Galen with reductive thinking and oversimplification.
*
*
*
*
*
In the fourth century BC, Aristotle may have considered his ideas concerning syllogistic
theory as representing one of many viable approaches to problem solving. But eighteen centuries
later, most western philosophers relied upon theories of knowledge informed by the Aristotelian
syllogistic, as it had evolved and been transmitted through the ages. In fact, in sixteenth-century
European medical schools, many of the basic ideas derived from syllogistic logic would be
conveyed and transmitted through the conceptual idea of “signs.” In Prior Analytics, Aristotle
wrote, “a sign means a demonstrative premise which is necessary or generally accepted; that
which coexists with something else, or before or after whose happening something else has
happened, is a sign of that something’s having happened.”45 Centuries later, St. Augustine of
Hippo issued a Christian interpretation of this Aristotelian concept when he defined a ‘sign’ as
45
Aristotle, Prior Analytics, ii.2 (70 a 5ff), quoted in Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance, 149.
54
“that which reveals itself to the senses and something beyond itself to the mind.”46 During the
early modern period, scholarly medical philosophers referred to signs as ‘nota,’ ‘indicium,’
‘connotans,’ and ‘indicans;’ these words can be found in virtually every learned medical treatise
during the Renaissance. ‘Signs’ came to represent a fundamental part of Aristotelian language
theory, syllogistic logic, and scholarly rhetoric in learned early modern European medicine.47
Let us consider a basic example Giacomo Baldini would have encountered during his
first week of medical education:
All who have milk are pregnant.
This woman has milk.
---------------------------This woman must be pregnant.
In this example, the syllogism is constructed around the relationship between ‘milk’ and
pregnancy. ‘Milk’ constitutes the ‘sign’ and pregnancy represents the object of the ‘sign.’ The
syllogistic logic used to demonstrate the final truth is deductive. Basic statements of truth (‘first
principles’or‘general principles’) combined with instruments of thought or conceptual tools like
analogies in thought processes, whether they be inferential, inductive, or deductive, to identify
physical states, illnesses and treatments in medical texts. Ian Maclean, Jerome Bylebyl, and
Nancy Siraisi have all suggested that such styles of logic were particularly strong at Padua
during the late Renaissance, but that should not obscure the fact that syllogistic knowledge
46
47
Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, 148.
Ibid., 149.
55
construction generally typified most scholarly early modern medical philosophy.48
To further illustrate the use of Aristotelian sign theory in sixteenth-century medical
books, let us consider a text published in 1549 by the medical professor Adrien L’Alemant. In an
oft-cited summary of Aristotleian doctrine, L’Alemant wrote:
There are three sorts of demonstrations from signs. The first is inferred, when a cause
unknown to us is proved from a manifest effect, as in this case: as often as these
symptoms are seen, namely difficulty of breathing, a stabbing pain in the side and
persistent fever, there will be inflammation of the intercostal membrane; pleurisy has
these symptoms; therefore pleurisy is an inflammation of the intercostal membrane.
The second sort infers an effect hidden from us from a sign. Whenever stiffness follows
on from an ardent fever, it causes the fever to go away. But when the bile inflaming the
skin is evacuated through sweat, stiffness occurs. Therefore, when the bile inflaming
the skin is evacuated through sweat, the ardent fever goes away. The third sort assumes
a remote cause, as in this example: anything which is troubled by melancholy is an
animal; a plant is not an animal; therefore a plant is not troubled by melancholy.49
It all seems simple enough. But as he outlined many different types of syllogisms,
Aristotle also described many different types of signs. The rather elementary examples described
by L’Alemant should not be misconstrued to suggest simplicity in Aristotelian logic. In fact, it is
far from clear that Aristotle himself would have been satisfied with the scholarly appropriation of
48
See Bylebyl, “The School of Padua,” 344. See also Siraisi, Medicine and the Italian Universities, especially the
Introduction, 1-11, and “Medical Scholasticism and the Historian,” 140-157, as well as Maclean, Logic, Signs and
Nature, 157. See also Bates, “Scholarly Ways of Knowing,” 1-23.
49
Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, 154.
56
his sign theory and syllogistic logic illustrated above. A rather systematic simplification of
Aristotelian syllogistic theory seems to have occurred during the merger of Hippocratic medical
teaching with Aristotelian logic. The main agent of such simplification seems to have been
Galen.
In Ars Parva, Galen divided ‘signs’ into four basic types: a) substantial signs, b)
immediate signs, c) accidental signs and d) mediate accidental signs. According to Galen, the
first are absolutely true, verifiable by experience; the second have all the appearance of truth, and
the last are no more than ‘often reliable.’50 Galen outlined four signs of pleurisy, attributing each
type of sign described above to certain physical characteristics. The same conceptual divisions
exist in Joannitius’s Isogogue, which, as we have seen, represented a refurbished version of
Galenic teachings featured prominently at Padua.
But Galen’s attempt to systematize sign theory reduces Aristotelian teaching to a base
level its original architect might not have recognized. We must remember, Aristotle himself
would not have referred to his style of logic as constituting a “method” at all. For Aristotle, every
investigation had its own particular subject matter and different types of investigations merited
different methods of procedure. But no such theory of knowledge would have been serviceable
for the art of medicine. Galen had to make Aristotelian logic more practical and utilitarian.
It is my contention that Galen focused on the concept of ‘signs’ within Aristotelian
syllogistic theory for two basic reasons: a). ‘signs’ represented a way to simplify and systematize
a potentially ever-expanding style of logic whose theoretical difficulties might otherwise result in
50
Ars Parva represents a series of Galenic treatises compiled and republished by students over 1400 years after the
Pergamonian’s death. Most medical historians believe the basic tenets of thought repeated in a wide variety of Ars
Parva editions to have been written by Galen during his time in Rome. In Venice, Ars medica, quae & Ars parva
was published in 1544 and is available at the Marciana Biblioteca. Adrien L’Alemant also published a commentary
on Ars Parva in 1549 entitled Ars Parva, Galen. See also Ottoson, Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy, and Seigel,
Galen’s System of Physiology and Medicine.
57
a paralyzing circularity of thought, and b). the concept of ‘signs’ resembled the notion of
‘symptoms’ among the sick and ailing. I shall elaborate upon the former point here.
While both Galen and Aristotle outlined series of ‘signs’ within models of syllogistic
reasoning, Aristotle detailed more signs and generally attributed greater complexity to the
theoretical implications of each concept he described. While all four of Galen’s basic signs—
substantial, immediate, accidental and mediate accidental—can be traced back to their
Aristotelian origins, many aspects of Aristotelian sign theory remain unaddressed by Galen.51
Galen seems to have deliberately avoided what Ian Maclean calls the “combinatory logic” in
Aristotelian sign theory, or the idea that certain observations may constitute a plurality of signs
simultaneously.52 Debates regarding relationships between signs and that which they
theoretically suggest, such as “which came first” (the sign or the phenomena) fill many more
pages of Aristotelian literature than Galenic writing. How can we understand the difference?
I believe that in order to sketch a practical epistemology for medicine, Galen needed to
establish a style of sign theory tending toward the provision of answers rather than the raising of
questions. In establishing his theories of knowledge, Aristotle concerned himself with a wide,
deep variety of epistemological issues. When searching for a theory of knowledge with which to
rationalize, justify and expand Hippocratic teaching, Galen concentrated on the practical aspects
of Aristotelian theory. In searching for the roots of early modern medical empiricism in
Aristotelian teaching, Robert Hankinson writes, “metaphysics aside, for ordinary, everyday,
medical purposes explanation must stop somewhere.” According to Hankinson:
Some things must be accepted as being fundamental in order to articulate a science of
51
52
See Sedley, “On Signs,” 239-272.
Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature,” 159.
58
medicine, even though they may not be so. [With regards to Aristotelian theory]
empirics could not concern themselves with the resolution of theoretical difficulties in
the concept of explanation. It would be of no practical use to try to aetiologize
absolutely everything.53
My point here is not to emphasize the relationship between Galenic treatments of
Aristotelian sign theory and the later growth of medical empiricism. But Hankinson’s point that
“the merger between Hippocratic treatises such as On Ancient Medicine, with Aristotelian
philosophy of science, produced a simpler, more practical style of medical theorizing,” is well
taken.54 Galen, as we have seen, largely orchestrated this merger.
Had Galen deliberately distorted Aristotelian sign theory? Perhaps.55 In 1601,
philosopher Joannes Silvaticus wrote, with regards to Aristotelian theory, “the medical art is
admitted to be defective in those parts which concern signs, more or less completely conjectural
and hardly necessary or demonstrative at all.”56 But Silvaticus’s concern for “demonstration”
may reveal an early modern intellectual ideology more closely related with the anatomy of
argument than the development of medical theory. Indeed, appropriating Aristotle’s ideas
regarding ‘signs’ into processes of medical theorization involved a certain commodification of
complex thought. But Galen was neither the first nor last scholar to selectively interpret a great
text for his own practical needs.
Nevertheless, Galen seems to have simplified Hippocratic teaching when combining it
53
Hankinson, “The Growth of Medical Empiricism,” 62.
Ibid., 63. George K. Plochmann and Neal W. Gilbert have also both emphasized that throughout the history of
western European natural philosophy, scholars working with Aristotelian teaching have tried to reduce complicated
thought-structures to sets of simple rules that fellow investigators might employ. See Plochman, “William Harvey
and His Methods,” especially 194, and Gilbert, Renaissance Concepts of Method, especially the final four chapters.
55
See Hankinson, “Galen on the Use and Abuse of Language,” 60-83.
56
Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, 161.
54
59
with Aristotelian sign theory as well. Jerome Bylebyl and Ian Maclean have both noted that in
De locis affectis, Galen reduced a wide variety of Hippocratic discourse originally published in
Aphorisms and Epidemics to a small number of primary signs.57 Hippocrates outlined numerous
ideas concerning a plethora of observations and their possible implications regarding health,
sickness, diagnosis and possible treatment; Galen crunched them into a manageable set of
conceptual relationships.58 Medical philosophers made similar observations regarding Galen
during the sixteenth century.
Ian Maclean has noted that in 1601, Italian medical professor Emilio Campilongo, in a
work entitled Seu nova cognoscendi morbos methodus, criticized Galen’s work regarding the
reconciliation of sign theory with Hippocratic ideas. Similar sentiments, according to Maclean,
can be found in Joannes Wolf’s 1620 Exercitationes semeioticae in Cl. Galenis de locis affectis
libros. Maclean suggests these medical authors felt a wide variety of diverse factors and
considerations regarding prognosis, originally outlined by Hippocrates, had been “reduced to a
small number of primary signs” by Galen.59
These critics did not object to Galen’s general use of Aristotelian natural philosophy and
logic in his reorganization and articulation of Hippocratic literature. Our modern notions of
plagiarism were not the issue. Instead, men like Campilongo and Wolf argued that Galen
distorted both Aristotelian theory and Hippocratic teaching by merging then within his newly
developed syllogistic logic. Such dissent dovetailed neatly with contemporary critics who argued
that sixteenth-century ‘Aristotelianism’ represented an artificial synthesis significantly different
57
See Bylebyl, “Teaching Methodus Medendi in the Renaissance,” 157-189, and Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature,
164-165. See also Nutton, “Galenic Medicine,” in Ancient Medicine, 230-248.
58
Smith, in The Hippocratic Tradition, discusses how Galen reworked Hippocratic teaching to suit his own
purposes. Also see the general introduction to Hippocrates, vol. 1, especially ix-ixix, and Temkin, Hippocrates in a
World of Pagans and Christians.
59
Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, 165.
60
from Aristotle’s original literature. The humanist’s point of view, that Aristotle’s writings had
been translated, abridged, and re-translated so many times, they had been irreparably corrupted,
furthered bolstered such criticism. In sum, many of Giacomo Baldini’s professors would argue
that Aristotelian logic ought not occupy such a central place and significant role in contemporary
medical philosophy, even if they were not on the cutting edge of the latest philological theory,
literary criticism or vivisectionist discovery.
Most medical philosophers during the late medieval period tried to reconcile the
differences between “Aristotelianism” and the Galenic tradition.60 Paduan University medical
professor Pietro D’Abano attempted such harmonization with his Reconciler of the Differences
Between and Especially of the Philosophers and Physicians, first published in 1300.61 D’Abano
wrote, taught and generally operated during a period of medical orthodoxy within the university
system.While monks demonstrated their faith by memorizing vast sections of the Bible, medical
students slavishly worshipped ancient texts. In such fashion, both theologians and aspiring
physicians avoided heresy.62
By the sixteenth century, as we have seen, the winds had changed. Fewer critics
suppressed their doubts regarding medical canon. Remarkably, some of these dissenting voices
conveyed their suspicion with the very same sets of questions modern historians of medicine ask
today—how had Hippocratic/Galenic theory returned to the forefront of learned medical research
and teaching in the sixteenth century? How had this knowledge been altered, changed, or
60
Nancy Siraisi has written that the Italian medical philosophers of the late thirteenth century “could have ignored
Aristotelian natural philosophy only at the risk of taking medicine out of the mainstream of learned scientific
activity.” In studying a cadre of medical professors at Bologna in the late medieval period, Siriaisi has discerned a
distinct effort to reconcile the ancient authorities, especially Galen and Aristotle, for the sake of the medical
profession, as these professors interpreted things. See Siriaisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, 201.
61
De Abano, Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et praecipue medicorum.
62
Until the last fifteen years or so, most traditional histories of scholarly medicine have portrayed this period of
medical orthodoxy as surviving straight through the sixteenth century into the first half of the seventeenth. More
recent studies, including this dissertation, see cracks in the old paradigm emerging earlier.
61
transformed over the centuries? How could the integration of Aristotelian thought and
Hippocratic teaching be properly understood? Why was ancient knowledge so important in the
first place? The similarities among the doubters of Baldini’s day and modern historians may be
underscored by the fact that these questions have yet to be decisively answered, even after four
centuries of investigation and debate. Again, historical contextualization would seem to be our
only hope. Like the scholars of the sixteenth century, we must re-examine the past to get a better
grip on these questions.
*
*
*
*
*
Traditional histories tell us that during the eight hundred years or so, following the fall of
the Roman Empire in the West till the balance of the Crusades, ancient Greek and Roman
teachings were thoroughly neglected in Europe. Barbarian invasions, wars, and lengthy political
instability buried the intellectual and cultural hegemony of Hippocratic, Aristotlelian and Galenic
knowledge for quite a spell. In fact, most textbooks on Western Civilization would suggest that
in 1566, Giacomo Baldini studied a revised body of Galenic thought articulated within a
refurbished Aristotelian logic, which had been recovered by European scholars and re-imported
from distant lands.
But what do the terms “recovery” and “re-importation” of ancient knowledge imply?
Until the last fifteen years or so, the term “re-importation” generally referred to the final stages
of the circuitous path ancient Greek and Latin learning supposedly traveled from the fall of the
Roman Empire in the fifth century to the largely Arabic lands of western Europe and the Near
East over the next few centuries, back to the European west during the early medieval period. A
plethora of books and manuscripts traveled eastward, so the story goes, as part of Alexander the
62
Great’s fourth century military conquest from Macedonia throughout a vast area of Western
Asia.63 But Aristotle tutored Alexander before the young Greek warrior achieved greatness.
Hence, Greek texts traveled eastward where they seem to have been received most efficiently in
the regions of Persia, the area that would later be called the “Middle-East” and Alexandria.
Athens and Alexandria became the world’s centers of scientific learning, but while Athens faded,
education and learning in Alexandria increased.64
During the rise of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries, Muslims conquered most of
the eastern territory described above and gained access to the original Hellenistic scientific
learning tradition. Islam inherited, translated, appropriated, absorbed, and synthesized several
intellectual traditions during this process. Indian, Egyptian and Chinese learning was also
absorbed by the Muslims during the eighth century. But most scholars in the English speaking
world assert the primacy of Greek knowledge when surveying the foreign teachings considered
by the various theaters of Islamic-Arabic civilization. As Bernard Lewis writes in a chapter
entitled “Science and Technology” in his book The Muslim Discovery of Europe:
The great age of classical Muslim science was initiated by translations and adoptions of
Persian, Indian and Greek scientific works. Though the translation movement ended in
the eleventh-century, the development of Muslim science continued for some time after
that. Muslim scientists added greatly to the material transmitted to them, through their
own researches and through practical experiments and observations in fields as diverse
as medicine, agriculture, geography and warfare. Of the external influences which,
through translations or otherwise, contributed to the development of Islamic science,
63
64
Wilcken, Alexander the Great, 18.
Sigerist, “The Latin Medical Literature of the Early Middle Ages,” 127-146.
63
that of the Greeks is the overwhelmingly most important.65
In fact, the four hundred years from the seventh through the tenth centuries witnessed
Arabic translations of virtually all Galen’s literature. Translations of the Galenic corpus were
most closely associated with a devoted band of scholars led by Hunain ibn Ishaq.66 But Arabic
scholars did not simply translate the ancient texts from their original Greek to Arabic. Instead,
Muslim medical philosophers generally produced annotated versions of the ancient texts. The
medical genre of “commentaries” refers to a translated text with remarks, analysis and
summaries from the author re-introducing the original work. Commentaries would represent a
crucial form of literature during the European Renaissance, when medical authors advocated or
attacked famous voices of the past. But in the history of learned medicine, the importance of the
genre during medieval times developed in the Arabic east.
Arabic translators/commentators generally presented ancient Greek knowledge in
glowing terms, often adding anecdotes and supportive elaboration to major principles,
demonstrating mastery of the subject matter in the process. In his study of Arabic versions of
Galenic literature, Richard Walzer extolled Hunain ibn Ishaq’s astonishing command of the
Greek scientific language. 67 Max Meyerhof also praised seventh, eighth and ninth century
Arabic medical philosophers for their knowledge, spirit and dedication to developing scientific
knowledge.68
Modern studies on this subject emphasize the extent to which Islamic scholars actually
65
Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, 221.
Hunain (809-877) became known to Europe as “Joannitius.” Before his death, Joannitius published an
encyclopedic compilation of Galenic medical theory known as the Isagoge. Many traditional histories of medicine
consider the Isagoge the most systematic exposition of medical theory produced during the medieval era.
67
Walzer, Galen on Medical Experience, vii.
68
Meyerhof, “New Light on Hunain ibn Ishaq and His Period,” 685-724. Also see Meyerhof, Studies in Medieval
Arabic Medicine, as well as Wilkie and Lloyd, eds., “The Arabic Version of Galen’s Ars Parva,” 145-148.
66
64
transformed the teachings received from foreign lands. Writing in 1975, Franz Rosenthal argued
that the work Islamic scholars performed on Greek texts amounted to significantly more than a
transformation of linguistic correspondence.69 Augusto Beccaria, a leading modern authority on
scholarly medical texts in the pre-Salernitan period (sixth to eleventh centuries) and a
contemporary of Rosenthal, advanced similar ideas. About forty-five years ago, Beccaria studied
a series of texts attributed to Hippocrates and Galen, from their storage in Alexandria to their
later consideration by western Europeans. According to Beccaria, the books contained influences
of university syllabi found in medieval Alexandria.70 After a careful consideration of thirteenthcentury medical texts, translations and university curriculum, Richard Durling concludes “the
medieval European medical syllabus was dominated by the Arabist tradition.”71 Few
comprehensive studies have provided detailed evidence to further support such views, however.
What makes the true authorship of pre-Salernitan medical texts, and their subsequent
reorganization and elaboration, so difficult to pin down? Unfortunately, several dynamics within
the culture of medical publishing during medieval and early modern times, both in western
Europe and the Muslim east, complicate the historian’s task. Medical authors, as we have seen,
often attributed their work to famous thinkers for the sake of gaining legitimacy. Other texts
seem to have been ‘de-authorized,’ or disassociated from their original author for political
reasons. For example, when Christian and Muslim scholars, operating under the scrutiny of their
spiritual tradition, sought to appropriate ideas from individuals outside their faith, relationships
between original authors and texts were often obscured. In the Christian medieval west, the
69
Rosenthal, The Classical Heritage in Islam, 22. For the most recent treatment of these questions, see Vagelphol,
Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the East.
70
Beccaria, “Sulle trace di un antico canone latino di Ippocrate e di Galeno,” pt. 1, Italia medioevale e umanistica,
2:1-54 (1959); pt. 2, 4:1-75 (1962); pt. 3, 14:1-21 (1971).
71
Durling, “A Chronological Census,” 234. See also Campbell, “The Medical Curriculum of the Universities of
Europe,” 357-367.
65
development of scholasticism, as we shall see in the next section, directly addressed this issue.
But before and after the rise of scholasticism, diverse phenomena within the culture of medical
publication obscured the relationship between texts and authors.
“In early medieval medical manuscripts,” explains Faith Wallis, “reverence for ancient
authority coincides with extraordinary indifference to textual authenticity.” According to Wallis,
“almost all the early medieval texts ascribed to Galen are pseudepigrahia; on the other hand,
virtually all the genuine Galenic texts appear as fragments in anthologies, stripped of the original
author’s name.” The problem seems to worsen in the late medieval period, when western
European scholars tend to organize collections according to famous authors, while scholars of
the Arabic east tend to publish anthologies arranged according to topics and ideas, regardless of
authorial citation.72
Nevertheless, a few generalizations on this subject may be advanced. Today, scholars
interested in pre-Salernitan medical texts usually argue that Western Europe’s re-absorption of
ancient Greek knowledge from the Muslim east should not be viewed as just another chapter in
the “Western Tradition.”73 “Western knowledge” did not literally become western again until the
thirteenth century and in the case of learned medicine, we may do well to extend this idea to the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In this sense, it may be more accurate to say that during the
medieval period, Western Europe “discovered” rather than “recovered” a body of knowledge
originally conceived in Greece, because the teachings had been significantly altered and the West
had no relationship with the knowledge in its new form. Crucially, when late medieval and early
modern Europeans began to appreciate ancient Greek texts once again, many medical scholars
72
See Wallis, “The Experience of the Book,” 107.
See Conrad et al., eds., The Western Medical Tradition, especially Conrad, “The Arabic-Islamic Medical
Tradition,” 93-138; Rosenthal, “Medicine from the 7th to the 14th Centuries,” 48-75; and Rahman, Health and
Medicine in the Islamic Tradition. See also Wallis, “The Experience of the Book,” 101-126.
73
66
initially worked with the Arabic translations, rather than the original Greek texts. The Isagoge of
Joannitius and Avicenna’s Canon would represent foundational texts in late medieval and early
modern European medical schools. The significance of this part of the story cannot be
underestimated and will be considered at length below.
In this brief section, however, I have attempted to emphasize the following idea: in the
history of medicine, this tale of “knowledge transmission,” from the European west to the
Muslim middle-east and back again, must be appreciated as a rich, complex story of
appropriation, dissemination and diffusion. The word “transmission” may play a crucial role in
the narrative structures of older histories of the Scientific Revolution, which always seem to
emphasize the capacity knowledge supposedly has for traveling. But to ask “how did the
knowledge get from Europe to the Muslim world” is to articulate an unconscious lack of respect
for Islamic-Arabic civilization. Similarly, to speak of Europe’s “recovery” or “re-importation” of
ancient learning makes it seem like the Islamic world served as little more than a passive conduit
for European service.
The word “transmission” resembles the word “translation” and the connotation of
“translation” does not do justice to the alterations and transformations Islamic scholars made in
Greek texts. In fact, the translation/transformation period, once thought to consist of about 400500 years, is now recognized as having occurred during the period from 800-1500. The
execution and dissemination of scholarly translations took place within another institution crucial
to the history of learned medicine, the medieval and early modern Christian university. In fact,
the appropriation and institutionalization of ancient Greek learning by places like the University
of Padua shall be the subject of the next section, as this aspect of the story represents a
significant transformation in western medical knowledge. But inside and outside the halls of
67
university, one basic historical idea seems undeniable: ancient Greek learning, from its original
conception to its discovery by medieval and early modern Europeans, had evolved considerably.
It had been consulted, reduced and augmented by different people of different mentalities,
separated by vast spans of space and time. “Modern science,” writes Toby Huff, “is the product
of intercivilizational encounters.”74
*
*
*
*
*
During the decade of the 1560s, Giacomo Baldini and his classmates would receive a
thorough indoctrination in the teachings of their distant European ancestors. Baldini and his
generation of students were told a “middle-period” separated them from the ancient authorities
their superiors insisted they emulate. This “middle-period,” according to the late sixteenthcentury scholarly class, represented a time of intellectual neglect, impoverished learning and
general backwardness. Baldini and friends were encouraged to define themselves in opposition
to this seven-century blip on the radar screen of time.75
Today, historians no longer use the term “Dark Ages” to describe European natural
philosophy between the fall of Rome and the revival of learning in the twelfth century. The
absolutely dismissive sweep implied by that epithet offends modern sensibilities.76 It is both
humorous and quite telling to realize that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century men of letters at
Padua would relate well to the idea implied by the “Dark Ages,” which resides quite outside our
historical vocabulary today.
74
Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science, 242 and 264. Again, Huff’s assessment typifies recent scholarship on
this question.
75
Kristeller, Renaissance Thought, 92. Kristeller points out that Humanist scholars consistently wrote of the revival
and rebirth of the arts of learning accomplished during their own time after a long period of decay. Also see Burke,
The European Renaissance, Centres and Peripheries, especially “The Age of Rediscovery, Early Renaissance,” 1847.
76
See Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 15.
68
Perhaps we are right and they were wrong. But we would do well to consider that modern
historians did not invent historiography. In fact, all significant thought about the past, regardless
of when it actually emerges, seems to involve compromise, adaptation and appropriation of
disparate ideas not easily reconciled with each other. Every time we think and write we operate
with theory and all theory is filled with ideological assumptions, whether we are conscious of
them or not. Such is the case with historical writing and philosophizing.
The production and evolution of “scholastic philosophy” in European history represents
an example of merger, appropriation, and ideologically driven combination of different sets of
ideas for the purpose of producing particular meaning. For intellectual historians of medieval
Europe, the term “scholasticism” generally refers to the Christian synthesis of ancient Greek
thought with the Catholic doctrine initiated by St. Augustine (354-430) and enhanced by Thomas
Aquinas. The intellectual linkage uniting elements of Greek and Roman classical culture with
elements of Christianity represents an important development in the history of learned European
medicine and deserves our attention here.
In attempting to forge an all-embracing synthesis, Aquinas sought to integrate into the
Christian intellectual tradition two fundamental principles: the significance of divine revelation
as the highest source of truth and efficacy of human reason for knowledge construction.77
Aristotle believed human ideas originated with the senses and that rationality represented the
virtue that made human beings supreme among living things. Aquinas used these ideas to
construct a synthesis of belief and rationale, ultimately hoping to buttress faith through reason.
Aquinas taught that Aristotle’s schema for interpretation and knowledge construction could
77
See Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, especially chap. 1 and his discussion of the Summa
Theologiae.
69
become supernatural when infused by grace.78 For Aquinas, reference to scriptural truths
anchored in spiritual faith completed the Aristotelian formula for learning. Reason needed faith,
taught Aquinas, to achieve the ultimate perfection of knowledge. “I believe in order that I may
know,” became the medieval phrase most closely identified with Aquinian scholasticism.79 The
significance and influence of these ideas on European medical education increased in the
centuries between Aquinas’s death and Giacomo Baldini’s tenure at Padua.
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) lived at a crucial juncture in the history and development
of scholarly western thought. Latin translations of the Aristotelian corpus were beginning to
influence circles of learned European thinkers. Interpretation of Aristotelian literature reopened
controversial debate regarding the proper relationship between faith and reason.80 If great works
of antiquity were gaining newfound attention, much of the tension and conflict implicit within
them were being reawakened. This crisis reared its ugly head just as medieval Europe patented
one of its finest inventions: the university. During the thirteenth century, major schools were
founded in Montpellier, Paris, Madrid, Bologna, Padua, Heidelberg, and Montecassino, to name
just a few.
The medieval university grew out of the Church’s desire to institutionalize the instruction
of future clergy.81 Aspiring theologians had been educated in cathedrals and church owned
schools for many centuries. But by the twelfth century, the Church itself may have been
influenced by the growing significance of guilds and corporations in medieval society. Guilds
offered methods for licensing skilled workers, patenting products and ideas, sanctioning
knowledge and authorizing citizenship which appealed to a Christian church with a newfound
78
Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, v-vii.
Gutek, “Thomas Aquinas: Scholastic Theologian,” 63.
80
See Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, Introduction.
81
See Verger, “Patterns,” especially “The Birth of Universities,” 47-50.
79
70
interest in growth and development. By the final decades of the 1100s, theological instructors
within large schools belonged to the universitas magistrorum, a rather corporate or guild-like
structure where unity implied strength, recognition and legitimacy. As large schools began to
institutionalize and professionalize themselves, new forms of learning emerged in medieval
Europe. Under the watchful eye of the Church, many forms of budding inquiry and newly
appreciated ideas were incorporated into universities for growth, development and proper
Christian nurturing.
After completing his monastic studies and taking an advanced degree at the University of
Paris, Thomas Aquinas agreed to serve as Regent Master of his growing school. Here, Aquinas
would render a crucial service for the future of the Catholic Church and university. Thomas
Aquinas would provide a modus vivendi necessary to settle the recent debates regarding faith and
reason and construct a working philosophy of education for the growing medieval university
system in the process.
Following the organizational template deployed by the earliest medieval Christian
universities, Aquinas treated “philosophy” as an umbrella concept, under which resided a variety
of investigative activities. Virtually all inquiry would be philosophical. But no overarching
system of philosophy, save the Christian faith as revealed by scripture, existed to unite the
various styles of inquiry now incorporated within universities. An educational philosophy,
entirely compatible with Christian belief, but articulated with the language of logic and framed
within the art of pedagogy, would be necessary. How could he construct a theologically valid
theory of knowledge and corresponding educational philosophy, derived from such theory,
sufficient to satisfy all the learned men from the various forms of inquiry recently invited to
university? For Aquinas, a man thoroughly trained in the anatomy of argument, a philosophical
71
system necessitated a readily discernible, consistent argumentative structure with which to
produce knowledge. He needed a reliable, or at least well known method of logical theorization,
which could accommodate a strong adjunct. Like Galen centuries earlier, Aquinas looked to
Aristotle. Indeed, Thomas Aquinas developed a theory of knowledge construction and
corresponding educational philosophy out of works attributed to Aristotle. The “Aristotelian
tradition” had grown again.
In constructing an educational philosophy derived from Aristotelian principles of
learning, Aquinas countered both the Averroistic interpretations of Aristotle, which he felt left no
room for Christian faith, and the Franciscan tendency to reject Greek philosophy entirely, which
struck Aquinas as misguided.82 Hence, right from the start, Aquinas weeded out influences from
the Arabic world he deemed undesirable and ignored certain voices within his own Christian
domain. Instead, the Christian theologian offered his “scholastic method:” Scientia, or the
subject matter of instruction, would represent an organized body of knowledge consisting of (1)
first principles, (2) arguments of systematic logical development that supported these principles,
(3) analogies and illustrations that served as illustrative examples, and (4) conclusions.83 The
linguistic devices, such as the metaphors, analogies and general poetics, and the overarching
ideas and themes conveyed by them, would conform to Christian scripture and theological
teaching. This organizational schema served as the principle method for constructing and
transmitting knowledge in medieval and early modern European medical schools.84
A variety of interpretations exists with regards to Aquinian scholarship, but it is not
82
See Elders, The Philosophical Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, 32-35.
Ibid., 68. Also see Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, new ed., especially chap. 1.
84
This basic idea can be found in several volumes. See Ottosson, Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy. For an
interesting discussion, see Grant, Were There Significant Differences between Medieval and Early Modern
Scholastic Natural Philosophy? See also Kittelson and Transue, eds., Rebirth, Reform and Resilience, especially
“The Durabilities of the Universities of Old Europe,” 1-18.
83
72
difficult to appreciate the Christian theologian’s dependence upon Aristotelian thought.
Nevertheless, Aquinas would do more than simply re-state Aristotelian ideas within the context
of the medieval Christian university. A discernible form of educational organization and
curriculum foundation emerged from Aquinas’s work. The medieval university student would
study in the seven liberal arts: the quadrivium of astronomy, arithmetic, geometry, and music and
the trivium of rhetoric, logic and grammar, all packaged in theological language and framed
within the overarching structure of the Church.85 University-based medical knowledge would
reside within the fields of rhetoric and logic. Specified parameters for the focused study of
medicine did not represent a crucial question during the early development of the medieval
university.
Aquinas himself maintained the relationship between the art of philosophy and the field
of medicine outlined by Aristotle fifteen centuries earlier. Medicine would constitute a subset of
natural philosophy. According to Aquinas:
It is the task of the natural philosopher to investigate the primary and universal
principles that govern health and illness; it is the physician’s to put these principles into
practice, in keeping with the idea that he is the maker of good health; the physician
must not limit himself to making use of medicines, but he should also be able to reflect
upon the causes of health and illness. To this end, the good physician begins his
training with the study of natural philosophy.86
85
Baldini, Legem impone sbactis: studi su filosofia e scienza, 12-14.
Aquinas, De sensu, 8.277-9.316. Aquinas actually said little else about medicine per se, but he discussed the
nature and quality of well ordered scientific inquiry at length, with great implications for the future of scholarly
medicine. Aquinas held that the theoretical use of the mind has truth as its object—such thought seeks not to
manipulate or co-opt properties of the physical world for human use, but only to understand the world around us.
The “practical use” of the mind seeks to guide some activity other than thought for the sake of understanding—
choosing in the case of ethics, designing a solid edifice in the case of architecture. Aquinas held that there existed
86
73
In the early part of the Middle-Ages, medicine had not been taught through institutions.
During these years, the impoverished western European schools failed to develop systematic
medical education. But now strands of medical ideas flowed through universities. As the
thirteenth century unfolded, the study of medicine began to take on some of the characteristics of
what later would be called a “discipline.” How would medical knowledge be disseminated at
university? Crucially, Thomas Aquinas would establish a comprehensive method for producing,
critiquing, expounding upon and disseminating scholarship.
Scholastic argumentation, as Faith Wallis correctly points out, would be based on
reference to authoritative sources. At university, medical knowledge would be disseminated in
terms which privileged arguments from authority.87 This dovetailed neatly with the Galenic
sentiments issued in Aphorisms, when the ancient Pergamonian claimed to be perfecting
medicine by moving toward a conceptualization of proper knowledge as derived exclusively
from specific books. Hence, in medieval times, medical knowledge would be accumulated by the
rote learning of canonical texts written centuries earlier. The ancient learning would be
rationalized and justified by styles of logic also served up for uncritical acceptance. The medical
student would develop less of an investigative aptitude and capacity for discovery and more of
many theoretical and practical sciences. Criminal justice, politics, and ethics represented practical sciences.
Mathematics and metaphysics represented theoretical sciences. Crucially, Aquinas held that certain discursive
activities might represent both practical and theoretical sciences. Physics, for example, might primarily help us gain
a better understanding of the physical world, but it might also be used to construct a solid dam or bridge. Hence,
latter-day scholastics argued that in the Aquinian mode of thinking, the art of medicine ought to represent a mixture
of practical and theoretical science. In the purely Aristotelian vein, scientia, as explained above, referred to certain
knowledge about distinctly defined subjects, achieved by rational demonstrations based on generally accepted
premises, leading to universally valid conclusions. In medicine, the status of scientia would traditionally be reserved
for theoria, or the philosophy of medicine predicated on ancient learning and logic. Other activities associated with
medicine, such as healing practices, surgery and anatomy, would be classified as artes because of their practical
goals and their inability to yield universally valid and permanent truths. These views held down to Giacomo
Baldini’s day, but not without tremendous controversy. On Aquinas, see Bourke, Aquinas’ Search for Wisdom, chap.
1, and McInerny, Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.
87
See Wallis, “The Experience of the Book,” 103. See also Verger, “Patterns,” 41-45.
74
an informed appreciation of time honored traditions. Appreciating this point necessitates taking a
closer look at scholastic pedagogy.
Thomas Aquinas’s most famous work, Summa theologiae, is divided into distinct parts,
themselves subdivided into carefully organized units.88 The units may be read together, as
constituting the larger narrative, or appreciated independently, as self-contained entities. Entitled
“questiones,” the organization of such units can be described as follows: each one of the
questiones begins with the clear identification of a problem, followed by citations of various
expert opinions concerning the problem. Next, follows the proposal of solutions. Considerations
regarding the relative strengths and potential weaknesses of each proposal follow. In conclusion,
one solution is proven by a combination of authority and syllogistic reasoning. From such textual
organization emerged the scholastic method of “questiones.”89 The “scholastic questio” became
the principal tool of text book instruction in medieval Christian universities. In medical teaching,
the style endured through the early modern period, but not without controversy.
The medieval Christian university also resurrected the ancient dialectical method of
teaching. With a bit of fine tuning, the dialectic pedagogy flourished in medical classes.
Required to memorize chunks of ancient texts, students would square off against each other in
organized “debate.” The instructor raised a particular question and participants recited relevant
text. One student pressed critical questions, framed in Aristotelian logic, while the student under
the spotlight defended the recited position. In such fashion, students demonstrated familiarity
with canonical texts and ability to deploy syllogistic logic.90 Apparently, instructors believed
88
Aquinas, Summa theologiae (Rome, 1268?). A version was printed in Padua in 1473, Summa theological, Pars
prima.
89
See Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, especially chap. 5, “The Nature of Medical Learning,” and chap. 8,
“Favorite Topics of Discussion: The Scholastic Questio as a Tool of Medical Teaching.” Also see Siraisi, Avicenna
in Renaissance Italy, and van Liere, “Humanism and Scholasticism in Sixteenth-Century Academe,” 57-107.
90
See Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, especially chapters 5 and 8. See also Siraisi, “Medical Scholasticism
and the Historian,” especially 143-145.
75
such exercises exposed students to the contours of difficult medical issues, while helping them
acquire the critical thinking skills necessary to a medical philosopher. Again, these pedagogical
methods endured for several centuries.
But the ancient medical texts revered by scholastics did not come without problems. As
every student of Western Civilization knows, the medical books of Greek and Roman antiquity
could not be unconditionally embraced by professors of Christian Universities. As interesting as
they were, these pagan texts fell into the category of irreligion. These foreign texts could, as
Faith Wallis persuasively suggests, “be subjected, with impunity, to radical and unabashed
reworking, dismemberment and de-authorization.”91 Aquinas and his followers acted
aggressively in this area. Indeed, the scholastic tradition served up certain aspects of ancient
Greek and Roman thought—Galen’s medicine, Aristotle’s biology and theories of logic, to name
a few—but omitted most of the ethics, moral philosophy and general literature authored by the
pagans of antiquity. Those aspects of ancient natural philosophy that could be reconciled with
Christian theology were appropriated into scholastic education. Those that could not, or those
that were deemed unimportant, were omitted.
But if the scholastics of Aquinas’s day hoped their strategically selective serving of
ancient literature would gain uncritical acceptance, they would be disappointed by scholarly
sentiment during the sixteenth century. As we have seen, many of Giacomo Baldini’s generation
would raise questions about the “reworking” and “dismemberment” of texts performed by
scholastic translators, educational theorists and pedagogues.
Before specifically examining such critical testimony, it shall be helpful to point out one
more area of appropriation, reconciliation, and common ground among styles of thought from
different eras. The idea concerns Aristotle and Aquinas and it has great implications for
91
See Wallis, “The Experience of the Book,” 125.
76
Renaissance medicine. We have seen that Aristotle believed legitimate ideas had to be
discernible to the senses. First principles were self-evident and constitutive components of
Aristotelian logic depended upon empirically derived knowledge about the natural world. As
described above, in Aristotelian philosophy, only that which is “necessarily the case” can be
known scientifically. Aristotelian knowledge had to be intelligible, sensible and readily
discernible.
In a very fundamental sense, Thomas Aquinas agreed. Aquinas believed natural
philosophers ought to observe, think, and draw conclusions about phenomena within the physical
world. That which could be readily understood ought to be seriously considered. But Aquinas did
not believe men should concern themselves with deeper explanations of physical phenomena or
those aspects of nature beyond our capacity to readily understand. Aquinas unapologetically
declared magnetism to be “an occult virtue which man is not capable of explaining.”92 For
Aquinas, men should not delve into the causes, reasons, and explanation of phenomena beyond
our capacity to appreciate with the senses. Such things were the domain of the Divine.93 Hence,
if Galen believed, as had Aristotle before him, that the objects of nature—every mineral, plant
and animal—possessed a definitive structure, purpose and role that could be understood and
utilized by men; if the intractability and pre-existence of matter inherent in Aristotelian thought
rested at the heart of Galenic medical philosophy, so be it, but these ideas would not gain
92
Hutchinson, “What Happened to Occult Qualities in the Scientific Revolution?” 237.
With these ideas, Aquinas followed his predecessor Augustine, the 5th century theologian who originally took up
the task of reconciling ancient Greek thought with Catholic doctrine. Augustine warned of excessive curiosity and
the vices of misguided investigation into nature. Encroaching upon the domain of the Divine constituted an
unacceptable form of “hubris,” according to Augustine. These ideas have been discussed in many scholarly
publications. See, for example, Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. See also Eamon, Science and the
Secrets of Nature, chap. 2, “Knowledge and Power,” especially 58-80. See page 60 for Eamon’s discussion of
Ecclus 3: 22-23 and Augustine’s Confessions. My copy is St. Augustine Confessions, translated with an introduction
by R.S. Pine-Coffin. Pine-Coffin discusses Aristotelian suspicion of curiosity in his introduction, especially 11-12.
Augustine’s text contains much on this subject throughout Books 2 and 3. See also Peters, “The Desire to Know the
Secrets of the World,” 593-610.
93
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elaborate expression in scholastic medical education. Aquinas and his followers selectively
appropriated Aristotelian logic and Galenic medical theory for use in medieval universities.
Much has been said about the religiosity built into medieval and early modern natural
philosophy. But in a sense, Thomas Aquinas separated theology from the areas of inquiry later
associated with “science.” Aquinas selectively used aspects of Aristotelian philosophy and logic
to argue that man could study God’s creation without trespassing into the Divine’s domain, so
long as one limited oneself to readily understandable aspects of nature.
Arguably, Aquinas’s division of theology from natural philosophy greatly facilitated the
development of modern science.94 But this development would unfold in a fashion Aquinas had
not intended. A growing body of knowledge, made possible by Christianized Aristotelian
inquiry, would exert intolerable pressure on traditional medicine, as conceived paradigmatically,
during the late medieval and early modern period. The Aristotelian emphasis on observation and
the corresponding logical methods deployed to develop knowledge with such observation would
ultimately raise provocative questions within the field. For example, why not open the human
body for physical investigation and use our theories of logic to develop more knowledge?
Scholastic education might emphasize the monopolistic legitimacy of philosophically derived
knowledge constructed through logic infused with grace, but might not some with a penchant for
anatomical dissection forget certain aspects of the equation?
Thomas Aquinas could scrap Aristotelian cosmology because it contradicted Biblical
scripture; he could outline an Aristotelian theory of philosophy and logical method and direct it,
with solemn prayer, exclusively at those aspects of nature that were readily understandable; he
could even develop a theory of teaching and learning devised to shape and mold the nature of
94
Guido Ruggiero makes a similar point in his article “The Strange Death of Margarita Marcellini.” Ruggiero
speaks more broadly of the Roman Catholic Church during the early modern period and less specifically of Thomas
Aquinas in the thirteenth century.
78
knowledge construction within Christian universities. But Aquinas could not control the
direction and nature scholarly medical discourse would take in subsequent centuries.
*
*
*
*
*
Discussing early modern medical education, Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones suggest
that “the medical science taught in universities down to the last decade of the seventeenthcentury remained largely an amalgam of Aristotelian philosophy, Galenic medical theory, and
Thomist theology, and was transmitted in a manner which combined some new textbook
methods of teaching with the older scholastic commentary.95 Indeed. But the components of that
“amalgam” were quite complex themselves. Aristotelian philosophy, as understood during the
Renaissance, only vaguely resembled the ancient Greek’s original teachings. Galenic medical
knowledge, as we have seen, represented a strategically conceived mixing of several intellectual
traditions, where questions of pragmatism and utility imposed upon interpretation and
development. Implicit within both Aristotelian philosophy, as conceived during the Renaissance,
and Galenic medical knowledge, as understood in the sixteenth century, were strands of
paradoxical thought, irreconcilable contradictions, and controversial ambiguities. If examined
closely enough, both Aristotelian philosophy and Galenic medical teaching, as conceived during
the early modern period, contained the seeds of their own destruction.
By the late medieval period, these intellectual traditions had been neglected, forgotten,
rediscovered, exchanged, thoroughly revised, augmented, translated and retranslated many times.
In order to provide an educational philosophy for contemporary universities, Thomas Aquinas
reworked Aristotelian philosophy once again. Three hundred years after Aquinas’s death,
however, his scholastic method of education faced serious challenges within the university
95
Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France, 109 (italics added).
79
system. At medical school, the basic components of scholastic education, Aristotelian philosophy
and Galenic teaching, were in declining health.
*
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*
*
*
In 1587, one Alessandro Massaria gained promotion to the highest level of medical
professorship at the University of Padua. Massaria addressed a large number of colleagues and
students during a ceremony organized to honor the occasion. The newly promoted professor took
the opportunity to seriously address the state of contemporary medicine. According to Massario,
the field’s greatest enemies were a group of subversive professors, confused critics, and
misguided philosophers. Voices opposing Hippocrates, Aristotle, Galen and Avicenna threatened
the very art of medicine, warned Massaria, and should be excluded from the University of Padua.
For the conservative minded Alessandro Massaria, the recent decline in respect for ancient
authorities constituted the medical discipline’s biggest problem.96
Massario mentioned names. The newly promoted scholar excoriated the French medical
philosopher Jean Fernel, whose recent book On the Hidden Causes of Things had criticized
scholastic methods of medical education. Worse, Fernel’s medical philosophy consisted of
strange concepts regarding celestial spirits, latent heat, total disease, and the healing potential
supposedly implicit within rocks, plants, minerals and virtually all physical components of
nature.97 But Massario spoke at greater length about fellow Italian Giovanni Argenterio, a former
medical professor at the University of Pisa.
96
See Siraisi, “Sixteenth-Century Medical Innovation,” 161-180. Much of the text of Massario’s speech is recorded
in contemporary Riccobono’s De Gymnasio patavino, fol. 71r.
97
Modern historians have portrayed Jean Fernel (1497-1588) as a less radical medical philosopher than Massario
suggested. Although Fernel had many dismissive things to say about traditional medicine during the sixteenth
century, some historians suggest the French medical philosopher remained heavily influenced by Galenic teaching
throughout his scholarly career. See Sherrington, The Endeavor of Jean Fernel. For the most recent and insightful
major work on Fernel, see Bono, The Word of God and the Languages of Man, especially chap. 4, “The Priority of
the Text: Bookish Culture and the Exegetical Search for Divine Truth, Fernel versus Harvey.”
80
Giovanni Argenterio (1513-1572) is best remembered as an avid critic of sixteenthcentury scholarly medicine.98 During a long career which featured time at the universities of
Paris and Pisa, with years of practice in Lyon and lengthy employment at the Florentine courts of
Cosimo De Medici, Argenterio expressed ideas about most of the pressing medical questions of
his time. Before his career ended, Argenterio attacked scholastic educational philosophy and
pedagogical methodology, humanist criticism, Hippocratic theory, Aristotelian logic, and
Galenic teaching. Alessandro Massaria blasted this native Piedmontese who “had dared to
criticize the logical books, Ethics, Meteorologica, and the entire natural philosophy of Aristotle
himself, and at the same time hurled his infinite and unbridled audacity at Hippocrates and
Galen.”99 Indeed, the centrality of ancient knowledge in scholarly medicine represented
Argenterio’s principle complaint with the art of healing.
“No builder built a house according to the directions laid down by an ancient
authority,” wrote Argenterio in 1551. “Because Galen wrote almost infinite volumes,” added the
professor from Piedmont, “he must have made many ill-considered statements without thinking
about them…hence, our stupidity should be even more condemned when we receive all his
books as absolutely true and attribute equal authority to each one.”100
Would not the ancients have made greater progress in philosophy if these most learned
men, who strove with one another in interpreting Aristotle and explaining his every
word in a recondite manner, had instead taken up the elaboration and illustration of
98
See Temkin, Galenism: Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy, especially 141-152, and Pagel, Paracelsus: An
Introduction to Philosophical Medicine, 301-304, in addition to Siriaisi, “Sixteenth-Century Medical Innovation.”
See also Nutton, “The Seeds of Disease,” and “The Reception of Fracastoro’s Theory of Contagion,” and
Richardson, “The Generation of Disease.” Bonardi’s Lo studio generale a Mondovi (1560-1566) examines the
career of Argenterio, 77-82.
99
Siraisi, “Sixteenth-Century Medical Innovation,” 161.
100
Ibid., 168.
81
some part of philosophy treated more negligently by our forefathers? For meanwhile
because we examine with superfluous labor the vacuum, the infinite, the three
principles, and the opinions of the ancients, we are ignorant of the nature of metals and
stones; nor do we know enough about the history of herbs and plants.101
Alessandro Massaria knew quite enough about the history of Giovanni Argenterio. But
Argenterio still enjoyed some support from Paduan alumni. Bernardino Telesio, arguably one of
the most influential natural philosophers in sixteenth century Italy, had studied at Padua during
the 1530s and had always admired Argenterio’s medical theory. Bernardino Telesio (1509-1588)
is generally remembered as a forerunner of early modern empiricism, or a brand of natural
philosophy predicated on direct observation, meticulous record keeping, experimentally tested
ideas and the development of hypothesizes without dogmatic reference to previously held ideas,
systems of rationale or orthodox logic.102 Many historians associate Telesio with Francis Bacon,
who famously described the Paduan philosopher as “the first of the moderns.”103 Others suggest
that Telesio’s mammoth nine volume work entitled De rerum natura iuxta propria principia
(“On the Nature of Things According to their Own Principles”) represents a more influential
critique of Renaissance metaphysics than anything ever written by Bacon, Thomas Hobbes or
Rene Descartes, for that matter. But many forget that at the outset of his career, Telesio primarily
concerned himself with medicine.
In Quod animal universum ab unica animae substantia gubernatur, contra Galen,
101
Ibid.
See De Franco, Intorno alla natura / Bernardino Telesio, and Kristeller, “Telesio.” See also Boenke, “Bernardino
Telesio,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Van Deusen, Telesio, the First of the Moderns.
103
Bacon, Opera omnia, vol. 3, 114. See also Van Deusen, Telesio: The First of the Moderns.
102
82
Telesio dedicated an entire treatise to criticism of Galenic physiology.104 Although never
published, the work circulated in manuscript copies throughout Europe. Telesio’s critique of
Galen included a comprehensive condemnation of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Indeed,
Telesio attacked both Aristotle and Galen for foolishly relying on self-referential reasoning
rather than authentic sense perception and first-hand empirical research. This basic
conceptualization and critical orientation served as the principle point of view from which
Bernardino Telesio generated much of his subsequent literature.
One of Telesio’s central critiques of Galen involved the ancient Greek’s perception of a
multiplicity of spirits within the human body. For Telesio, the governance of the human body
could not be explained by a plurality of “systems” simultaneously working together, with each
governed by its own particular spirit, as Galen seemed to imply. Instead, Telesio advocated the
medical theory of Giovanni Argenterio, which presupposed the unity of one soul, or spirit, and
judged this influence to be the sole force empowering the body.105 Alessandro Massaria may not
have been familiar with Telesio’s advocacy of Argenterio’s theory of singular spirit. But the
newly crowned full professor surely read of Bernardino Telesio’s graphic condemnation of
Christianized Aristotelianism and the scholastic philosophical tradition.
After all, Telesio’s systematic assault on Aristotle had been celebrated by one of the late
Renaissance’s most famous natural philosophers. Although best remembered for his political
theory, Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) greatly prided himself on his medical knowledge.
Campanella studied medical writers from Hippocrates and Galen to Pietro D’Abano, Jean Fernel
and Giovanni Argenterio. He published an eight volume treatise on healing entitled
104
De Franco, Intorno alla natura / Bernardino Telesio, XXII.
Boenke, “Bernardino Telesio,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Paginations may vary. Boenke’s
discussion resides on page 5 of 11 in my copy.
105
83
Medicinalium in 1635.106 Campanella praised Telesio for “having used his arrows to pierce and
kill Aristotle, the tyrant of minds, restoring to mankind the libertas philosophandi (freedom to
philosophize) which is inseparable from truth in the process.”107
Campanella utterly dismissed Aristotelian cosmology. For Campanella, the concentric
crystalline spheres allegedly separating the celestial region from the sublunary world were the
products of poor imagination. Pathetic attempts to outline a theory of microcosm/macrocosm
between the human body and the delusions of some long dead Greek man could only produce
falsehoods. Like his hero Telesio, Campanella believed that adequate knowledge of all things
only came from direct consultation of the things themselves; misguided reference to external
thought, whether it be systems of logic or “laws of natural philosophy,” only separated
investigators from realistic opportunities to uncover meaningful knowledge. Aquinas’s scholastic
treatment of Aristotelian teaching had done little for Campanella. In fact, Tommaso Campanella
specifically criticized scholastic education. For Campanella, sophistical disputes characterized by
pointless battles over words and “rational debate” only polluted young minds and retarded
intellectual development.108
Dissatisfaction with scholastic treatment of Galenic medical beliefs predated Telesio and
Campanella at the University of Padua. Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525) received a doctorate in
medicine from the university and taught at Padua for eighteen years. Like Bernardino Telesio,
Pomponazzi took exception to the Galenic theories of body and soul which generally held
currency during the early sixteenth century. But the nature of Pomponazzi’s criticism and the
alternative theories he proposed fundamentally differed from the ideas of Telesio and
106
Campanella, Medicinalium libri, i-viii.
Campanella, Le poesie; testo criticamente riveduto e commento a cura di Francesco Giancotti, 278.
108
Firpo, Il supplizio di Tommaso Campanella: narrazione, documenti, verbali delle torture. See also Firpo et al.,
eds., Autobiografie di filosofi: Cardano, Bruno, Campanella, chap. 5, “Tommaso Campanella,” and Ponzio,
Tommaso Campanella, Filosofia della natura e teoria della scienza.
107
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Campanella. Pietro Pomponazzi was a staunch Aristotelian.
In his 1516 Tractatus de immortalitate animae (“A Treatise on the Immortality of the
Soul”), Pomponazzi put forth an Aristotelian interpretation regarding the relationship between
the body and the soul. According to Pomponazzi, the soul could not be inseparable from the
body. Nor could there be a plurality of spirits governing the multiplicity of systems supposedly
existing within the body. Aristotelian logic dictated that the soul could never perform its
activities, including governing the body and directing the intellect, without the physical
assistance of the body itself. Hence, to preserve the unity of the individual, Pomponazzi rejected
notions regarding the separate existence of the soul.109 Similarly, in his 1520 On Incantations,
Pomponazzi systematically critiqued common beliefs associated with healing that involved
natural magic, miracles, charms, oracles and demonic possession with Aristotelian logic.
According to Pomponazzi, the idea of an incorporated entity, such as an angel, demon, or
magically summoned spirit, acting upon a corporeal body, could neither be empirically
appreciated nor rationally demonstrated.110
For Pomponazzi, the fundamental problem concerned Averroist and Thomist
interpretations on Aristotelian doctrine. Medieval treatments of ancient wisdom had taken
learned men away from truth and reality. The Paduan medical philosopher also looked
suspiciously at Galenic treatments of Aristotelian teaching and poorly conceived methods of
scholastic education that invited illogic into the classroom. A key figure in the Aristotelian
tradition of the early sixteenth century, Pomponazzi advanced a humanist’s desire for the strict
109
Pomponazzi, Tractatus de immortalitate animae a cura di Gianfranco Morra, chap. 1, “Pomponazzi, l’uomo
possiede.”
110
Pomponazzi, Gli Incantesimi, a cura di Cristiana Innocenti [On Incantations, translated from Latin to Italian
with commentary].
85
return to unabridged Aristotelian teaching in its original articulation and purest form.111
The Paduan defense of orthodox Aristotelianism did not end with Pietro Pomponazzi’s
death in 1525. Giacomo Zabarella (1533-1589) advanced the cause even more seriously. After
earning a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Padua, Zabarella avidly sought to
defend the superior status of theoretical natural philosophy against the pressures emanating from
the growing practical disciplines, such as medicine, anatomy and applied mathematics. In other
words, Zabarella worked to maintain the Aristotelian distinction between theoretical and
practical science, which held the theoretical as superior, and he mainly advanced his arguments
through discussions concerning the relationship between the philosophy of nature and the art of
medicine.112
Zabarella rejected the Thomist implication of medicine as constituting a mixture of
theoretical and practical science. Instead, he concentrated on what Aquinas actually said on the
matter, and wholly subordinated medicine to philosophy. In fact, Zabarella claimed medicine
could never enjoy scientific status, despite the discipline’s growing prominence among the arts,
because medicine’s ultimate purpose and function did not concern the generation of
knowledge.113 Medicine worked toward specific ends, namely the maintenance and restoration of
health. True to his Aristotelian loyalties, Zabarella argued that true sciences existed for the sake
of knowledge. In purely Aristotelian terms, Zabarella argued that medicine did not explain “first
causes,” hence, the medical practitioner could never fully understand the essence of what he
encountered. Health could not be fully comprehended, argued Zabarella, and the goal of
111
Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher, especially 34-46. Pine argues that Pomponazzi’s main gripes
concerned the Christianization of Aristotelian teaching. See also Kristeller, Aristotelismo e sincretismo nel pensiero
di Pietro Pomponazzi, especially 10-14.
112
See Poppi, Ricerche sulla teologia e la scienza nella Scuola padovana del Cinque e Seicento, especially “Metodo
e tecnica in Iacopo Zabarella,” 153-166. See also Schmitt, “Experience and Experiment: A Comparison of
Zabarella’s View with Galileo’s.”
113
See Mikkeli, An Aristotelian Response to Renaissance Humanism, especially “Arts and Sciences in Zabarella’s
Thought,” 21-45, and “The Foundation of An Autonomous Natural Philosophy,” 211-228.
86
medicine could not be achieved, if a physician did not comprehend all the parts of the human
body and their nature, composition, purpose and function.114
Zabarella dismissed the sixteenth-century medical philosopher’s critique of
Aristotelian/Galenic theories on the soul out of hand. The physicians misunderstood Aristotle,
who never attempted to explain physiological dynamics or corporeal phenomena via discussion
of the soul. Hijacking Aristotelian principles and re-territorializing the ancient master’s theories
to pursue their own practical questions, contemporary medical philosophers distorted Aristotle’s
teaching. For Zabarella, Aristotle outlined a science of the soul to enrich the art of natural
philosophy, not explain the human body.115
Crucially, for the purposes of this chapter, Zabarella did not share Pietro Pomponazzi’s
suspicion of Arabic treatments of Aristotle. In fact, in his largest treatise on Aristotelian
teaching, Opera logica (1578), Zabarella followed Averroes in order and arrangement of topics.
Although he concentrated on the original Greek manuscripts, rather than Latin translations,
Zabarella did not dwell on the significance of language.116
The lack of a linguistic component in Zabarella’s criticism warrants attention. Language
constituted a major trump card in professional debates among medieval and early modern
medical philosophers. Etymological and philological debate, issues concerning translations, the
relevance of literary criticism to the interpretation of ancient texts, the significance of rhetoric—
all these linguistically based issues—often fueled professional infighting among opposing
medical scholars. Even Giovanni Argenterio, who fundamentally opposed early modern
medicine’s reliance on ancient knowledge, framed much of his criticism in arguments
114
Ibid., 212-213.
See Kessler, “The Intellectual Soul,” 485-534, especially 530-34.
116
I have consulted the Minerva company’s Frankfurt edition entitled Opera Logica by Jacopo Zabarella (as
Giacomo Zabarella was often referred to following his death). See also Kessler, “Zabarella, Jacopo (1533-1589),”
836-839.
115
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concerning language. As Nancy Siraisi has shown, “In the preface of his Opera [Argenterio’s
major publication], Argenterio characterized the professors of the most outstanding academies in
the world, as the vulgar would believe, as grammarians rather than physicians, because of their
emphasis on Greek philology and Latin rhetoric.” According to Siraisi, “Argenterio explicitly
paralleled humanist philology with the scholastic questiones method, asserting that neither
provided a valid method for achieving real knowledge in medicine.” In a long running feud with
a medical philosopher named Dr. Tubingen, Argenterio derisively referred to his opponent as
“grammatics Tubingensis.”117
Analyzing Argenterio’s remarks regarding the distinction between physicians and
grammarians shall be the purpose of the next section. One basic quality remained common to
pre-modern humanists, scholastics, orthodox Aristotelians and even empirically oriented
physicians: they fought their battles in a language of textual criticism. The significance of texts
and language also distinguished the scholarly medical practitioner’s mental world from that of
the vernacular healer outside university.
*
*
*
*
*
In 1453, Niccolo Leoniceno graduated from the University of Padua with an advanced
degree in medicine. A doctor’s son, Leoniceno worked for a licensed apothecary and studied
medicine at Vicenza before enrolling at Padua. After graduation, Leoniceno moved on to the
University of Ferrara where he taught medicine for many years. But Leoniceno lacked the
unconditional respect for tradition generally associated with high learning during the
Renaissance. In fact, by the time his career ended, Nicolo Leoniceno had earned a reputation as a
staunch critic and master reformer of contemporary medicine.
117
Siraisi, “Sixteenth-Century Medical Innovation,” 169.
88
Leoniceno’s desire to improve fifteenth-century European medicine emerged from
linguistic concerns. A close look at his university career reveals a penchant for philological
studies. Leoniceno’s mastery of Greek enabled him to appreciate the differences between the
original ancient texts scholarly medical philosophers supposedly revered and the Latin
translations they actually studied. By the time he reached fifty, Leoniceno dedicated himself to
acquiring as many important texts as possible, mastering Arabic, providing new translations, and
spreading the call for reform.118
By the end of the fifteenth-century, many perceived Nicolo Leoniceno as “the restorer of
ancient medicine.” Leoniceno issued new translations of Hippocrates’ Aphorisms, most of
Galen’s famous “Sixteen Books,” as well as treatises attributed to Aristotle. As Daniela Carrara
explains, “Leoniceno was committed to a program of restoring medical knowledge to its pristine
form.” The professor from Ferrara criticized the Romans of Galen’s day for poorly translating
ancient medical texts from Greek to Latin. Leoniceno hurled the same critique at the medieval
scholars of Aquinas’s generation. But “the great restorer” saved his most vivid invective for the
Arabic commentators such as Joannitius, Averroes and Avicenna. Nicolo Leoniceno pushed for
the elimination of “barbarian texts,” that is, Arabic medical works, from sixteenth-century
European universities. According to Leoniceno, the Arabic author’s misunderstood the ancient
works; they added words where none were necessary, failed to elaborate when appropriate, and
imposed their own misguided ideas upon the texts they mistreated. For Leoniceno, the medieval
Arabic medical philosophers represented the “corrupters” of the ancient tradition.119
Many colleagues followed Leoniceno’s lead. Humanists with medical education, or
medical philosophers with humanist sympathies, began publishing new translations of the most
118
See Carrara, La biblioteca di Nicolo Leoniceno: Tra Aristotele e Galeno, especially 7-11, 14, 18-27, 35.
Ibid., chap. 2. See also Nauert, “Humanism as Method: Roots of Conflict with Scholastics,” 427-438, especially
438, where Nauert uses the expression ‘barbarian texts.’ See also Nutton, The Rise of Medical Humanism.
119
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revered ancient texts. Between 1495 and 1525, new Greek editions of the major Hippocratic,
Aristotelian, and Galenic texts popular in European medical schools rolled off the printing
presses of Venice, Basle and Paris. Historians often speak of this period’s imperialist clashes and
religious conflict, but as the new century dawned, a different sort of “war” also raged in
Europe.120
Thousands of scholarly publications describe the intellectual distinctions and professional
quarrels between early modern humanists and scholastics.121 The following considerations may
be advanced: a). during the medieval period, scholasticism emerged as the dominant intellectual
tradition in western Europe and the greatest influence on institutions of higher education, b).
humanism, or at least the style of humanism represented by Nicolo Leoniceno and his admirers,
basically grew out of scholasticism and represented a critical reaction to scholastic thought, c).
humanism pressed for total reform of the traditional model of liberal arts education, d).
humanism questioned the validity of the scholastic theory of knowledge and the scholastic quest
for absolute truth, and e). humanism constituted a fundamental challenge to the entire medieval
intellectual tradition.
The history of scholarly medicine is a history of ideas. Many ideas had been developed
and exchanged from Hippocratic times down through the early Renaissance. One idea held up
rather well: ancient texts possessed authoritative wisdom. But now a fundamental challenge to
this basic notion emerged within the intellectual trend of humanism. Humanists claimed most
scholastics could not properly read the texts.
120
Criticism of traditional late medieval education, or scholasticism, had been expressed by earlier generations of
humanists like Petrarch, Valla, Erasmus, and Vives. But it was during the reign of Pope Leo X (1513-1521) that
Italian Humanism is regarded as having ushered in a “Second Golden Age.” Quarrels between humanists and
scholastics heated up around the turn of the sixteenth century.
121
Some of the most famous authors include Paul Oskar Kristeller, Hans Baron, Eugenio Garin, Giuseppe Toffanin,
Roberto Weiss, Eric Cochrane, and Charles Nauert, but the list grows each year.
90
As Charles Nauert explains, “the humanists dismissed medieval learning as worthless
trash, the product of a barbarous and incompetent age, an incompetence symbolized by the
inability of the scholastic doctors to consult the original Greek texts.”122 In 1547, humanist
Martin Acakia spoke of medicine in the Middle Ages as “buried and overwhelmed in a great
gloom.”123 Sixteen years earlier, Johann Guinther rejoiced in the knowledge that “medicine has
been raised from the dead.” The humanist Guinther declared that “Hippocratic and Galenic
teachings, hitherto both almost utterly corrupted, are only now at long last rescued from darkness
perpetual and silent night.”124
According to Nauert, “Humanists now [c. 1500] wanted to intervene at the very outset of
the interpretative process by insisting as grammarians, that the grammarian—the humanist expert
on languages and on the reconstruction of texts—had to establish the text itself and explain to
those who could not read the original what the words really meant.”125 With new forms of
literary and textual criticism, predicated largely upon expertise in grammar, humanists staked
claim to the interpretative processes upon which all traditional medical learning depended. A
new set of self-appointed masters emerged.
Scholastic medical philosophers spent long years of study with syllogistic logic and
dialectical argumentation, memorizing vast tracts of ancient and medieval texts. If they worked
with politically tailored versions of intellectual discourse, they either did not realize it or chose
not to dwell on those aspects of “Christianized learning.” In fact, the faithful scholastic believed
only his intellectual method and the authoritative text mined with it, produced absolute
knowledge. The humanist considered the existence of “certain knowledge” an assumption—a
122
Nauert, “Humanism as Method,” 435.
Cited from Durling, “A Chronological Census of Renaissance Editions and Translations of Galen,” 239.
124
Ibid., 239.
125
Nauert, “Humanism as Method,” 436.
123
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fallacious one at that—but for the scholastic, absolute knowledge represented the essence of
natural philosophy; recall the Aristotelian principle that survived Aquinian editing: only that
which is necessarily the case can be known scientifically. Technically, humanists and scholastics
disagreed on the nature of knowledge and the object of science.
In medieval and early modern Europe, as today, graduating from medical school required
great sacrifice. Scholastic medical philosophers struggled to accept humanist critiques of their
professional opinions. When challenged by the nihilistic sweep of humanist criticism, scholastics
commonly rejected their detractors on professional grounds. The humanist philosopher with
medical interests lacked the advanced degree from the high faculty of medicine; the critic had
not the qualifications necessary to pass judgment. The medical philosopher with humanist
sympathies had been intoxicated by the destructive drug of grammar; his focus had long since
been derailed from the proper study of the body to the trivial study of sentence structure. Neither
man constituted a legitimate medical philosopher. They were grammarians.
Humanists and scholastics attacked each other on dozens of major points. Scholastics
justifiably argued that humanism did not represent a systematic philosophy or method of
knowledge construction. Humanists critiqued traditional education, complained scholastics, but
offered no comprehensive solution. Humanists countered by suggesting that while scholastics
thought their intellectual method, educational philosophy, and pedagogical methodology
comprehensive and totalizing, a realistic look indicated otherwise. Scholasticism was, by
definition, selective, partial and limited. Humanists attacked the scholastic process of extracting
isolated statements from a text and then treating those sentences as accurate reflections of the
author’s opinion, without attention to what the sentence implied in its original context. More
fundamentally, humanists formally objected to the literary strategy that resided at the heart of
92
scholasticism’s academic project: the selective appropriation of ancient texts.
As students of literature, humanists studied the ancient texts in greater detail than
scholastics. Humanists read Hippocratic, Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian and Galenic volumes in
their original form, prior to scholastic treatment of the texts. As literary critics, humanists
approached the books as textual constructions, suitable for analysis, not mystical sources of
wisdom, worthy of unconditional acceptance after a bit of scholastic seasoning. As there existed
different schools of scholastic thinkers, various styles of humanist thought emerged and
interpretations varied. But most humanists quickly seized on the partial, unbalanced and strategic
interpretations of ancient texts by scholastic educators.
After all, in Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote:
Experience is the knowledge of particulars, but not of universals….It is not man the
physician cures except incidentally, but Callias or Socrates or some other person
similarly named, who is incidentally a man as well. So if a man has theory without
experience, and knows the universals, but does not know the particular contained
within it, he will fail in his treatment; for it is the particular that must be treated.126
Why had scholastics not emphasized this passage? Could not these words be interpreted
as stressing the significance of experience and particulars over grand philosophical theorizing
and universals? Might not this passage be used to emphasize the importance of observation,
empirically derived knowledge and crucial distinction among particular details? Let us recall that
Aristotle had once written that “a first principle contradicted by experienced reality could not be
a valid first principle.” But over fifteen centuries later, scholastic Aristotelianism held that the
126
Aristotle, Metaphysics, i.I, 980, b 14-24.
93
eternal and immutable first principles taught in medical school could not be overturned by mere
experience. In fact, scholastic medical philosophers did not study the particular, corruptible
elements, but their “common form,” the universal, which necessitated comprehension by the
intellect. Scholastic medicine always emphasized theory over experience.127 Paduan medical
students were not encouraged to contemplate the significance of empirically derived knowledge,
even though Aristotle had penned thousands of pages about such things. Those aspects of
Aristotelian logical theory had not survived the scholastic institutionalization of ancient learning.
Nevertheless, by the sixteenth century, many medical professors argued that scholarly
medicine was overly dependent upon logic, too theoretical and insufficiently empirical. The final
section of this chapter considers the University of Padua’s two most famous examples.
Understanding the major issues, questions and controversies surrounding scholarly medicine
during the late Renaissance necessitates considering the careers of Andreas Vesalius and William
Harvey.
*
*
*
*
*
In December 1537, the University of Padua granted Andreas Vesalius the degree of
Doctor of Medicine Cum ultima diminutione (“With Highest Distinction”). The next day saw
Vesalius recognized by the Senate of the Venetian Republic, crowned “Professor of Surgery,”
and declared the most authoritative anatomy specialist at the Paduan university. But almost five
hundred years later, historians of medicine still struggle to describe Vesalius’s relationship with
anatomical authority during his own time.
There can be no doubt Vesalius changed anatomical studies. Prior to the year of his birth
(1514) candidates for advance degrees in medicine were formally required to display knowledge
127
See Ottosson, Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy, 87.
94
of anatomy gleaned almost entirely from text books. Arabic translations of Galenic anatomical
studies by Joannitius and Avicenna generally served as the authoritative texts. In 1514, however,
Nicolo Leoniceno published a collection of Galen’s anatomical works translated from the
original Greek directly into Latin, eliminating the Arabic influence. The new editions created a
stir in anatomical studies.
Seventeen years later, at the Medical Faculty of Paris, Johan Gunthier published a
Greek/Latin translation of Galen’s most thorough work on anatomical procedure, De Anatomicis
Administrationibus. Although primarily a language specialist, Gunthier did hold the title
“Professor of Anatomy.” A student of Gunthier, eighteen-year-old Andreas Vesalius once
remarked, “I would not mind having as many cuts inflicted upon me as I have seen him
[Gunthier] make on man or brute.”128 For Vesalius, Gunthier had not performed enough actual
dissection to lead an anatomical studies department.
Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) cut a different trail. From Paris to Louvain, to Padua,
Vesalius performed live anatomical dissections for medical students, university professors and
patrons of education. In addition, the Brussels native would publish illustrated picture books,
complete with anatomical plates, detailed explanations and esoteric analysis. In 1538, Vesalius
published an imposing illustrated anatomical treatise later called Tabulae Anatomicae Sex. The
same year, Vesalius published a volume entitled Institutionum Anatomicarum Secundum Galeni
Sententiam ad Candidatos Medicinae Libri Quator, which amounted to a reworking and
expansion of Gunthier’s Galenic anatomical translations. The following year, Vesalius published
an anatomical treatise entitled the Venesection Letter. This work finds Vesalius entirely in line
with the contemporary views of medical humanists; the art of medicine had been corrupted
during the “Dark Ages” and the more recent reliance on polluted texts, but now the pristine
128
O’ Malley, The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius, 13.
95
truths of the ancients were being restored and properly appreciated. In 1543, Vesalius published
his own Magnus opus. That year marked the initial printing of De Humani Corporis Fabrica.129
Historians have labeled Fabrica everything from the ‘most influential book in
Renaissance natural philosophy’ to ‘the beginning of modern science.’ For generations, scholars
seeking to narrate the history of science as a story of progress have singled out Fabrica as a
crucial bridge linking past to present. Kuhnian interpretations of “scientific revolution,”
complete with abrupt shifts, suddenly ruptured discourse and great leaps forward, depend upon
such notions of great texts. In the 1540s, so the story goes, Copernicus’s De revolutionibus and
Vesalius’s Fabrica changed scholarship in general and natural philosophy in particular. With
Fabrica, scientific knowledge construction significantly shifts from dogmatic reliance on
authoritative sources and theories of rational logic, to empirically derived ideas and
experimentally tested hypotheses. With Fabrica, natural philosophers truly begin to investigate
nature.130
The truth remains elusive. Firstly, Fabrica’s remarkable complexity makes it difficult to
evaluate as a unified text. Simultaneously an anatomical atlas, an illustrated picture book, a
manual for dissection, a history of anatomy, a dictionary of anatomical concepts, and a
comprehensive analysis of the body, the book defies categorical description. “The complex
structure of the book,” writes Nancy Siraisi, “has always made it difficult to evaluate
129
I have used Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica; On the Fabric of the Human Body: A Translation of De
Humani Corporis Fabrica, translated by William Frank Richardson in collaboration with John Burd Carman,
hereinafter known as Fabrica.
130
Modern scholars often criticize “traditional histories of science” for their teleological stories of progress that
allegedly analyze the past with regards to the present. A common example and target of much criticism is
Butterfield’s The Origins of Modern Science. For a more recent example, see Fenster, Mavericks, Miracles, and
Medicine, especially chap. 1, “The Art of Medicine, Andreas Vesalius, Observation and Anatomy.” Randall’s The
School of Padua and the Emergence of Modern Science and Kearney’s Science and Change, 1500-1700, especially
the chapters on Vesalius and William Harvey, are two other examples extremely relevant to this chapter.
96
relationships and priorities among its various components.”131 Secondly, while Vesalius expands
upon Galenic anatomy and respectfully raises some question about the ancient Greek’s vaguest
anatomical principles, Fabrica can also be read as an endorsement of Galenic teaching. As
Siriaisi points out, Fabrica is meant to be read alongside Galenic anatomical manuals. Much of
the volume’s pedagogical narrative directs the reader to Galenic text and assumes the reader’s
familiarity with Galenic concepts. “Rather than precluding continued direct study of Galen,”
remarks Siraisi, “Fabrica demands it.”132
Indeed, one basic quality unites the various components of Fabrica: the consistent
reference to Galen’s famous On the Usefulness of the Parts. In Fabrica, Vesalius selectively
expands upon certain Galenic ideas, enthusiastically supports others, indirectly refutes others
still, and ignores many altogether. Vesalius’s colleagues and students began to wonder about his
relationship to Galen. What did Vesalius’s project and method imply for Galenic anatomy as
understood within scholastic medical philosophy?
Vesalius himself wrote, “As the Gods love me, I yield to none in my devotion and
reverence for Galen, no one can nor should enjoy any greater pleasure than praising him.”133 A
short time later, the Paduan professor added, “I am almost as afraid to argue about his [Galen’s]
authority as I would be tacitly to doubt the immortality of the soul in our holy religion.”134 As
Charles D. O’Malley explains, “Although much has been made of the Vesalian anti-Galenism,
this has been grossly exaggerated and represents a complete misunderstanding of Vesalius and
his times.”135 Yet, how can we understand the relationship between Vesalius and Galen as
131
Siraisi, “Vesalius and Human Diversity,” 63.
Ibid., 65.
133
O’ Malley, The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius, 13.
134
Montagu, “Vesalius and the Galenists,” 234.
135
O’ Malley, Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 7. Andrew Cunningham presents a slightly different point of view,
emphasizing the idea that Vesalius believed himself engaged in something quite novel. See Cunningham, The
Anatomical Renaissance, especially 7-10.
132
97
revealed in printed texts? Why should this question be so difficult to answer?
The problem concerns the period of agonizing transition experienced by scholarly
medicine during the sixteenth century. Opposing voices consistently spoke past each other. The
culture of early modern university—the requirements of legitimacy, publication, advancement
and respect, further complicate matters. The various forces simultaneously pulling Vesalius’s
work in different directions and professional constraints imposed upon him by university make it
difficult to conclusively demonstrate deliberate programs within his publications.
These ideas become more apparent when we systematically consider the questions,
choices and challenges facing Vesalius as he attempted to develop his anatomical program. To
begin, Vesalius had to respect Galenic authority. No other anatomical paradigm existed at
university. Ideational development within natural philosophy flowed from consideration of, and
subsequent reaction to, established bodies of thought. Aristotle had written that “there is no
science that does not spring from preexisting thought.”136 Scholastic theories of logic did not
believe in innate knowledge. Hence, up-and-coming thinkers could not introduce entirely novel
ideas without foundation. Instead, they wrote within the genre of “commentaries,” which
allowed them to explain their ideas with regards to established knowledge. Legitimate analysis
required basis in previously established thought, even if such analysis occasionally undermined
or challenged conventional belief.137
Siraisi has cast doubt on Vesalius’s alleged subversive tendencies by pointing out that he
wrote Fabrica not for an introductory audience, but for “eruditi viri.”138 But the conventionally
136
Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I, I, 7IAI.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, authors of “commentaries” were writing in a more critical fashion than
their medieval predecessors. Vesalius’s treatment of Galen is certainly less flattering than the reflections offered by
Joannitius and Avicenna. In this sense, the genre of commentary writing had changed. This shift represents part of
the increasing tension experienced within scholarly medicine during the late Renaissance. Nevertheless, at medical
school, scholarly thought on any subject still proceeded from discussions of established authority.
138
Siraisi, “Vesalius and Human Diversity,” 64.
137
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ambitious, self-promoting Vesalius spoke to the highest levels of state and university at an early
age. A combination of unusual talent, well placed professors, and good fortune placed Vesalius
before the Venetian Senate and in the top publishing houses before his thirtieth birthday. Sensing
opportunities for greatness, Vesalius wrote strategically. A straightforward manual designed to
influence impressionable minds would not have served him well. Pursuing promotion, tenure,
legitimacy and fame necessitated respectful, conciliatory language and deference before
authority.139
But the path to fame remained tricky. Vesalius’s work raised controversial questions
concerning the limits of legitimate inquiry. Did not his intensive investigation of the human body
potentially encroach upon the Aquinian prohibition against excessive curiosity? In scholastic
knowledge construction, as explained above, legitimate inquiry concerned that which could be
readily understood. Vesalius’s efforts to explore the body on a deeper level raised technical
questions about the human body and theoretical questions about natural philosophy.
In addition, Vesalius’s work stirred provocative debate concerning the scholastic
conception of scientia versus artes. Attempting to advance the significance and status of
anatomical studies, Vesalius needed to rationalize and justify his requests for money, time, space
and publication contracts. Professing to simply correct Galenic errors did not constitute a viable
strategy. Instead, Vesalius cautiously implied that his new anatomical program would lead to a
kind of knowledge about the human body that did not necessarily have any directly practical,
therapeutic objective. In discussing his findings concerning the bony structure of the eye,
Vesalius remarked, “if we contemplate the fabrica of man in this fashion, we will grasp things
which may not greatly conduce to the usefulness of the art of medicine, but demonstrate the
admirable industry of the great Creator and which without doubt were sedulously and studiously
139
See Montagu, “Vesalius and the Galenists,” 234. See also French, Medicine before Science, 143.
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examined by the ancient professors of anatomy.”140 Hence, Vesalius elevates anatomical
dissection from a practical art to a discursive practice, capable of yielding knowledge normally
produced by the theoreticians of scientia. Would the methodological practices and technical
processes of the art remain subordinate to the study of text and the contemplation of logic for
long? Would the discipline remain a subset of natural philosophy?
William Harvey may have been less concerned with such grand questions and more
interested in the specific technical details of Vesalius’s anatomical work. Nevertheless, Harvey’s
career would have tremendous impact on the biggest questions surrounding scholarly medicine
during the late Renaissance. Walter Pagel once suggested “the foundation of modern scientific
medicine began with William Harvey’s study of blood circulation between 1615 and 1619 as
inspired by Andreas Vesalius’s method of pictorial representation within anatomical studies.”141
During the period in which Pagel wrote, many historians of science presented Harvey’s work as
unprecedented, revolutionary, and entirely opposed to conventional thought. Cardiovascular
theories aside, William Harvey’s true place in history stemmed from his fundamental opposition
to Aristotelian teaching and scholastic philosophy.142 Indeed, much documentary evidence
survives to support such thinking.
William Harvey (1578-1657) graduated from the University of Padua with a doctorate in
medicine at the age of twenty-four. At the height of his fame, Harvey declared, “I profess both to
learn and to teach anatomy, not from books but from dissections; not from the positions of
140
Siraisi, “Vesalius and Human Diversity,” 66.
Pagel, “William Harvey and the Purpose of Circulation,” 22.
142
In his 1953 essay, “The Reaction to Aristotle in Seventeenth-Century Biological Thought,” Pagel himself wrote,
“Seventeenth-century scientific thought is often represented as the fruit of antagonism to Aristotelian and scholastic
philosophy…..Such a view calls for qualification—at all events in the sphere of seventeenth-century biology.” See
Underwood, ed., Science, Medicine and History, 489.
141
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ancient philosophers, but from the very fabric of nature.”143 Harvey described certain ideas of
Aristotle as “erroneous and hasty conclusions; like phantoms of darkness…they suddenly vanish
before the light of anatomical inquiry.”144 Harvey also criticized Galen, dismissing the ancient
Pergamonian’s teaching as “self-contradictory, contrary to experience, contrary to reason, and
contrary to experiment.”145 Indeed, William Harvey seemed to possess all the qualities for the
precursor of the modern scientist: the free-thinking disposition, emancipated from ancient
dogma, self-assured, confident in his own method and powers of observation, satisfied with
nothing less than empirically derived knowledge and experimentally tested ideas.
Closer inspection reveals otherwise. While he labeled Galen “self-contradictory,” Harvey
himself also wrote, “the authority of Aristotle has always had such weight with me that I never
think of differing inconsiderately.”146 After years of studying early modern medicine, Mary
Lindemann concludes, “Harvey saw the body much as Galen did, as a vessel filled with vital
forces.”147 The most prolific Harveian scholars view the former Paduan student, professor,
physician, anatomist and medical philosopher as a staunch Aristotelian.148
Different historians of medicine emphasize different aspects of Aristotelian theory in
Harvey’s work. For example, Walter Pagel stresses the influence of the late sixteenth century
style of Paduan Neo-Aristotelianism on Harvey. According to Pagel, Harvey’s cardiovascular
theories stem directly from three Aristotelian tenets: (1) the macrocosmic / microcosmic
143
Harvey, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus. See “Epistle dedicatory to Dr. Argent,”
Preface, iv.
144
Pagel, “William Harvey and the Purpose of Circulation,” 197.
145
Plochman, “William Harvey and his Methods,” 202. See also Payne, Harvey and Galen: The Harveian Oration,
1896.
146
Pagel, “William Harvey and the Purpose of Circulation,” 28.
147
Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 74.
148
See, for example, Pagel, New Light on William Harvey, especially chap. 2, “The Harveian Aristotle and the
Aristotelian Harvey,” 13-33, and chap. 7, “ Harvey Aristotle and Medieval Revisionism,” 74-87, as well as Pagel,
William Harvey’s Biological Ideas, especially chap. 1, “The Influence of Padua, Aristotle ovum, Aristotelianism,”
19-51. See also Whitteridge, William Harvey and the Circulation of Blood, and French, William Harvey’s Natural
Philosophy.
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relationship between the universe and man, (2) the virtuous nature of circular motion, and (3) the
cyclical pattern of fluids in nature—evaporation, condensation, and evaporation once more. For
Pagel, these mainly cosmological considerations, which were quite popular among Fabricius and
Andreas Cesalpino, two dedicated Aristotelians who instructed Harvey, reside at the heart of
Harveian theory.
“He [Harvey] was a true pupil of the school of Padua,” explains Pagel, “and a staunch
Aristotelian.”149 According to Pagel, the Paduan Neo-Aristotelian style of natural philosophy did
not represent some conceptual language with which Harvey rationalized his cardiovascular
theories in post-hoc fashion. On the contrary, Aristotelian philosophy drove William Harvey’s
biological theories.
George K. Plochmann prefers to emphasize a purer textual relationship between
Aristotelian literature and Harveian theory. For Plochmann, Harvey’s doctrines concerning the
circulation of the blood can be directly traced back to passages in Aristotle’s Organon as well as
the “theory of the four causes” established in Book I of Metaphysics and Book II of Physics. In
addition, Plochman tends to emphasize Harvey’s use of Aristotelian theories of logic, as opposed
to Pagel’s emphasis on Aristotelian cosmology. “We must think of Harvey as making use of
Aristotelian concepts in heuristic fashion, and then, finding them fruitful in his preliminary
dialectical examination of possibilities, making certain of them principles in his demonstration of
the circulation of blood.” Plochmann concludes, “this methodological reading of Harvey’s
relation to Aristotle seems to make sense.”150
Gweneth Whitteridge sees Harvey as a rational, unemotional, unapologetic empiricist
who simply believed himself to interpret Aristotle better than his Paduan colleagues. Whitteridge
149
150
Pagel, “William Harvey and the Purpose of Circulation,” 28.
Plochman, “William Harvey and His Methods,” 208.
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portrays neither the controversial metaphysician described by Pagel nor the dedicated textual
researcher of Plochmann. Instead, Whitteridge describes an anatomist who took Aristotle’s
emphasis on empiricism to heart, developing a relatively new theory of the body with the best set
of tools he could find in ancient texts and the freshest cadavers in Italian medical schools.
I shall make no effort to determine the superior argument. Instead, I would like to
emphasize a crucial similarity among the three hypotheses described above. All three historians
indirectly emphasize the various interpretations of Aristotelian theory possible to a late
Renaissance medical philosopher. Aristotelian natural philosophy had a multi-dimensional
presence within early modern medicine. A plurality of interpretations regarding Aristotelian
teaching existed within scholarly Renaissance medical debate. Different scholars emphasized
different aspects of Aristotelian literature. There existed different types of “Aristotelians” and
people invoked Aristotelian theory for different reasons. Emphasizing this almost paradoxical
complexity may constitute our best chance of gaining an accurate understanding of early modern
scholarly medicine.
As a discursive formation, scholarly medicine during the early modern period represented
a bricolage of many different intellectual traditions; a wide variety of disparate ideas, not easily
reconciled with each other, were tenuously held together by broader ideas concerning tradition,
expedience and authority. Like any complex area of inquiry, scholarly medicine constituted a
work in progress—its practitioners were trained in theories of logic and ideational
development—and a collective critical voice within the profession attempted to promulgate new
ideas, thereby producing constant discursive evolution. This collective disposition, however,
could not be easily reconciled with the conservative orientation at the heart of university based
scholastic medicine. As we have seen, learned medicine’s official theory of knowledge,
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scholasticism, generally aborted the development of novel ideas and new directions.
Scholasticism’s conservative influence and medicine’s dominance by the larger discourse
of natural philosophy may have produced tension in the wide variety of medical students anxious
to distinguish themselves at university. Nevertheless, thinkers from different backgrounds and
various academic interests were united by certain things during the early modern period. Deep
respect for the distant past characterized the intellectual disposition of the Renaissance scholar.
Greatness resided within antiquity, waiting for the resourceful researcher to uncover the pristine
knowledge of yesteryear. This basic mindset received a boost with late medieval developments
within the intellectual trend of humanism. As we have seen, with a set of hermeneutics
emphasizing language and literary analysis, humanism established the foundation for a powerful
critique within Renaissance medicine: the ancient texts underpinning scholarly medical discourse
required re-examination, cleansing and a new set of interpretations.
But the renewed search for original texts led to other troubling discoveries. The historical
construction of Renaissance medicine now came under critical scrutiny. The merger,
appropriation and ideologically driven combination of different intellectual traditions that
produced scholarly medicine now became historical phenomenon suitable for analysis. Hoping to
outflank their professional opponents, academics from different scholarly backgrounds now
hunted for ammunition to support polemical arguments against each other. Universities presented
‘rational medicine’ as beyond reproach, but scholars within university began to critically
examine the nature and historical evolution of medical philosophy, mainly to sure up their place
within the discipline.
To a certain extent, early modern scholars began to contemplate the very ideas
emphasized in this chapter. Aristotelian philosophy, as consulted, debated and deployed during
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the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, represented only a selective portion of the ancient
Greek’s original writings. Galenic medical knowledge, as understood during the early modern
period, represented a strategically conceived combination of Hippocratic teaching with strands of
Aristotelian theory, where pragmatic questions governed interpretation and development. The
rise of the medieval university added another layer of controversial complexity to scholarly
medical discourse. The appropriation and institutionalization of ancient learning by Christian
schools necessitated a theory of knowledge and philosophy of education to organize, expand,
transmit and control a wide variety of disparate ideas. Scholasticism forged a working synthesis
of different traditions and a functional operationalism for the medieval Christian university. But
scholasticism could neither provide an invulnerable model for future discursive production nor
shield itself from the insightful critics who sensed its anti-intellectualism.
At this point in the narrative it is tempting to portray the alleged battle between humanists
and scholastics as a bi-polar dynamic framing scholarly medicine’s historical evolution. But
there existed different types of humanism and different types of scholasticism. Renaissance
humanism did not constitute a new philosophy that replaced a dying scholasticism, thus ushering
in the modern intellectual disposition of university. Nor did the “empiricist’s approach”
associated with Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey replace the over-intellectualized rational
medicine of the early Renaissance with practical modern science.
It was more complicated than that. We have seen how Giovanni Argenterio and Pietro
Pompanazzi both rejected sixteenth-century treatments of Aristotelian teaching, but for entirely
different reasons. Alessandro Massaria demanded renewed respect for medical knowledge
gleaned from antiquity, but recent Latin translations of ancient texts satisfied his interests. On the
contrary, many humanists scholars insisted only the original Greek versions of ancient medical
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literature constituted true philosophical wisdom. Philologists emphasizing such ideas indirectly
propped up Galen. But humanists specializing in rhetoric criticized traditional interpretations of
Galen’s Hippocratic/Aristotelian synthesis. When reading modern histories of the Renaissance
one meets humanist scholars interested in medicine, medical philosophers influenced by
humanism, and ‘humanist medical philosophers,’ but the differences could easily outweigh the
similarities among men from these categories.
We have seen how Bernardo Telesio and Tommasso Campanella criticized
scholasticism’s rational medicine, predicated upon speculative philosophy, as described by the
ancients. For these men, Aristotelian logic could never drive the art of medicine; theory ought to
be derived from experience. William Harvey’s methods seemed the very embodiment of the
‘new empiricist’s’ approach. But Harvey considered himself an Aristotelian; his methods and
theories were driven by Aristotelian logic. In retrospect, Harvey seemed most influenced by
certain aspects of Aristotelian logical theory underemphasized by Galen and deliberately omitted
by Thomas Aquinas. Nevertheless, Harvey proceeded in Aristotelian fashion as he established
the groundwork for a science of anatomy that would replace that of Galen. Such paradox typifies
the history of medicine.
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*
In an imposing recent study, Ian Maclean argues against the popular portrayal of
Renaissance scholarly medicine as a static, monolithic, inflexible body of belief, doomed to
implode by the late sixteenth century. Instead, Maclean finds a ‘loose logic’ deployed in early
modern medicine and a ‘relaxed structure of thought’ among medical professors. Regarding the
interpretation of signs, for example, Maclean suggests that broadly based conceptual schema
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allow for a variety of ‘valid readings’ to emerge simultaneously. According to Maclean, no
overarching system of thought truly exerted tyrannical control over the students and practitioners
in medical schools. Instead, a highly manipulatable theoretical foundation allowed creative
thinkers to diagnose intuitively while justifying their actions in post-hoc fashion. For Maclean,
the malleable, flexible nature of Renaissance scholarly medicine reflects the health, adaptability
and vigor, rather than the demise, of the tradition. A clear implication emerges from Maclean’s
work: we ought not abandon the intensive study of scholarly medicine during the early modern
period.151
Maclean’s philological skills, research habits, breadth of knowledge and sheer intellectual
capacity warrant respect. But his argument seems forced. One wonders if Ian Maclean might not
be reacting to the recent marginalization of his brand of medical history. Recent scholarly studies
of medicine focus on the social, cultural and anthropological roots of healing phenomena. The
material culture of healing processes, the commercial influence of the medical marketplace, the
relationship between vernacular and learned healing, the gender dynamics between healers and
patients, now constitute the questions most readily entertained by publishing houses. Oldfashioned masters of ancient Greek and Latin texts have seen their popularity wane. We have
moved away from doctrinal approaches to medical history.
Ironically, Ian Maclean may be experiencing something akin to the plight of the scholarly
medical philosophers he studies. Like Dr. Maclean, early modern medical philosophers from a
variety of backgrounds came under attack in the late sixteenth century. Sensing the
marginalization of their expertise, many re-investigated the past, as Maclean has done, with
renewed vigor, for evidence of self-affirmation. Both in the sixteenth century and today, renewed
151
Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, especially chap. 5, “The Arts Course,” and chap. 7, “The Content of Medical
Thought;” see also 332 and the entire “Postscript,” 333-342.
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efforts to reconstruct scholarly medicine’s history have produced richer, more insightful, and
ultimately more complex understandings of the discipline. As the ideological battles continue,
our appreciation for scholarly Renaissance medicine’s multi-layered complexity grows.
The nature of that multi-layered complexity remains debatable. One can approach early
modern scholarly medicine from a number of different perspectives. Many modern scholars
attempt to explain the demise of scholasticism’s Galenic medicine. Others, like Ian Maclean, try
to demonstrate the full richness of the art, its adaptability, capacity to endure, and ability to
survive. Most historians try to explain how we got from there to here.
But some ideas should remain common to any serious investigation of western
medicine’s history. The following set of generalizations may be advanced: during the
Renaissance, scholarly medicine consisted of a tenuous mixing of several intellectual traditions
wrapped in an educational philosophy designed to control thought. Centuries of selective
appropriation, culturally determined development and ideologically driven refinement produced
a complex, unwieldy discourse wrought with dangerous fissures. The stepchild of natural
philosophy, developments within scholarly medicine required constant reconciliation with a
larger discourse quite unconcerned with practical questions facing healers. Dissent, disagreement
and lack of consensus characterized scholarly medicine’s body of practitioners. Most medical
philosophers primarily concerned themselves with their place in the profession rather than the
trajectory of the discipline.
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Chapter Two
Humors, Complexion, Spirits and Energy:
The Technical Side of a Philosophical System;
Galenic Medicine during the Late Renaissance
By January 1568, medical student Giacomo Baldini might have wondered when he would
actually begin studying the human body, health, sickness, healing, and the technical aspects of
curing illness. In all likelihood, Baldini would have finished his second year of medical school at
the University of Padua. Yet during the second half of the sixteenth century, European medical
students generally did not focus upon the internal dynamics of the human body, disease, and
healing practices before they had completed at least two years of advanced training in language,
logic, rhetoric, and natural philosophy. While it may seem anachronistic to think early modern
students impatiently anticipated the more focused aspects of purely medical study, modern
historians have uncovered evidence of such dissatisfaction.1 Then, as now, many students
preparing to embark upon graduate training seem to have only vaguely understood what the
pursuit of advanced degrees actually entailed.
Nevertheless, as the creeping darkness and moist chill of the Paduan winter closed in on
Giacomo Baldini, the opportunity to directly study Galenic medicine and humoural theory would
unfold before him. It would take at least one year before he could realistically be expected to
gain intellectual ownership of the fundamental principles, major precepts, and subtle nuances of
this system of medical beliefs. I shall attempt to describe the most important points of such
knowledge over the next sixty pages.
*
1
*
Puschman, History of Medical Education, 251-256.
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During the late Renaissance, for the purposes of instruction, the University of Padua
divided the Galenic/Humoural medical system into two main parts: the theoretical and the
practical. The ‘theoretical’ represented the overarching framework and general context in which
the art of healing was understood. As explained in the previous chapter, as a university
discipline, medicine remained subordinate to natural philosophy, yet medicine itself constituted a
philosophical system. ‘Theoretical medicine’ represented the coherent, unified body of rationally
ordered knowledge necessary to such a philosophical system, complete with its own set of
epistemological, metaphysical, and ontological foundations. During the Renaissance, ‘theoretical
medicine’ subsumed ‘practical medicine.’ Hence, the ‘practical branch,’ which broadly refers to
the technical treatment of sick patients, constituted a subset or aspect of the ‘theoretical.’
The ‘practical’ component of humoural theory, however, should not be understood as the
purely clinical side of medicine in any modern sense; students working in ‘practical medicine’
did not master applied healing techniques while their colleagues studying ‘theoretical medicine’
labored in the rhetoric, logic, and philosophical studies of Baldini’s first two years at Padua.
Instead, both branches combined bookish intellectual studies with technical challenges of applied
practice; neither area was practical in the sense of ‘clinical.’ This rather perplexing relationship
of theoretical and practical medicine represented a controversial subject during the Renaissance,
and modern scholars still fundamentally disagree on the distinction between the two branches of
study. Hence, the subject requires careful consideration and further elaboration.
The professor of theory outlined the general principles of health and sickness while
describing the theory of the body upon which humoural medicine depended. As Jerome Bylebyl
observes, “the professor of theory instructed students in general explanatory principles of health
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and disease, namely physiology and general pathology, as well as introducing them to major
elements of medical practice, which included semiology, hygiene and therapy.”2 Instructors in
the ‘practical branch’ covered much the same territory, but they conveyed their major ideas
mainly through narratives on disease. Pathology and nosology represented the major areas of
emphasis in ‘practical medicine.’ Understanding how and why the body malfunctioned served as
the general context for instruction within this branch of study. Early modern medical students
also learned the skills of ‘bleeding,’ ‘cupping,’ ‘lancing,’ and ‘bone-setting,’ among other things,
while gaining a basic understanding of most contemporary surgical procedures.3 In fact, one
could earn an advanced degree in surgery and gain “exclusive legal rights,” in some European
states, to perform medical operations. But scholarly medical philosophers and proud collegiate
physicians rarely practiced surgery. In early modern Europe, medical surgery generally
constituted an artisanal skill. Most ‘barber surgeons’ learned their trade in craft-apprenticeship
systems. Such men lacked prestigious university degrees.4
At university, however, the similarities between ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ medicine
outweighed the differences in one very important sense. Both served mainly to rationalize and
justify the philosophical underpinnings of humoural theory. One could argue that the practical
side of the humoural system served mainly to reify and affirm the most demonstrable ideas
within the theoretical system. A tourniquet slowed the bleeding of an open wound, but its
greatest value concerned its capacity for demonstrating arterial and venous circulation. Giacomo
Baldini’s first year textbook at the University of Padua, the Canon of Avicenna, deals explicitly
2
Bylebyl, “The School of Padua,” 338.
These techniques shall be further described in the section on healing practices contained in this chapter.
4
Laws prohibiting surgery by anyone other than a licensed medical practitioner were virtually meaningless in
medieval and early modern Europe, as they were rarely ever enforced. Surgery shall be further described in the
section on therapeutics later in this chapter. For a concise overview, see Ambroise Paré: Ten Books of Surgery,
especially the Introduction.
3
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with the relationship between theoretical and practical medicine:
When, in regard to medicine, we say that practice proceeds from theory, we do not
mean that there is one division of medicine which we know, and another, distinct
therefrom, by which we act. We mean instead that these two aspects are both
sciences—but one deals with the basic principles of knowledge, the other with the
mode of operation of these principles. The former is theory; the latter, practice.
Theory is that which, when mastered, gives us a certain knowledge, apart from any
question of treatment. The practice of medicine is not the work which the physician
carries out, but is that branch of medical knowledge which, when acquired, enables
one to form an opinion upon which to base the proper plan of treatment. Theory
guides to an opinion, and the opinion is the basis of treatment. Once the purpose of
each aspect of medicine is understood, you can become skilled in both theoretical
and applied knowledge, even though there may never come a call for you to exercise
your knowledge….5
Indeed, many licensed physicians only “exercised applied knowledge” reluctantly. Most
prescriptions consisted of suggestions and advice regarding healthy lifestyles. Medical
philosophers outlined regimens of health for those who strayed from the path of proper living.
5
Gruner, A Treatise on the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna, 91. This version of Avicenna’s Canon was originally
translated by Gruner and later annotated by Michael McVaugh. In the 1930 version of this volume, Gruner describes
Avicenna’s Canon as a “summary” of the Galenic medical system, “an exhaustive compilation and systematization
of all the scattered knowledge contained in Galen’s writings.” Historians of Renaissance medicine have found these
writings to be commonly used in the best early modern medical universities, and Bylebyl had determined the Canon
of Avicenna to be a basic text at Padua in the late sixteenth century. See Webster, ed., Health, Medicine and
Mortality. In his 1930 translation of Avicenna’s Canon, Gruner wrote, “such treatises helped set the tone of Western
medicine in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; however much they might emphasize the importance
of practical knowledge, or the nature of medicine as an ‘art,’ the effect of their very structure was to favor the logical
element over the clinical” (Introduction, ii).
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Cutting, draining, burning, and lancing represented last resorts for professional healers who
diagnosed and prescribed in fashions modern patients would consider indirect, passive, and,
quite probably, futile. Scholarly Renaissance physicians preferred the eloquence and safety of
broad, sweeping, general language to the risky, untidy practice of physical intervention.
Although not uncommon, even medicinal prescriptions such as herbal concoctions, dietary
supplements, or chemical solutions were not routinely deployed.6
If professors of university medicine fashioned themselves as “medical philosophers,”
more concerned with providing intellectually coherent and rationally ordered accounts of the
human body’s composition and physiological processes than prescribing cures for illness, then
the distinction between theoretical and practical medicine ought to be easily understood. Sharp
distinctions between scholarly medicine and vernacular healing outside university might also
follow from such considerations. But a carefully balanced examination of the major concepts,
significant ideas, basic assumptions, and fundamental practices associated with humoural
medicine leads us elsewhere. A purely doctrinal understanding of Renaissance medicine
inevitably leads to dichotomous analysis—‘theoretical’ versus ‘practical,’ ‘scholarly’ versus
‘vernacular’—but a more comprehensive understanding of medicinal discourse may allow us to
appreciate the common assumptions, basic perceptions, and fundamental ideas that a wide
variety of early modern healers actually shared. From the university classroom to the anatomy
lab, from the licensed apothecary shop to the botanical gardens, from the printing shop to the
public medical marketplace, from the major city’s licensed physician to the countryside’s
6
In a famous passage on therapeutic methods, Galen wrote, “Health consists in natural activities, illness consists in
unnatural ones; health consists in the natural conditions, illness consists in the unnatural conditions; health consists
in the dispositions, and illness consists in them too.” Clearly, for Galen (and his early modern emulators), health
depended upon a lifestyle, frame of mind, and set of physical activities, including diet, most closely related to and
efficiently aligned with the harmony of nature. The strategic manipulation of the body, whether in the form of
surgical intervention or the introduction of foreign substances, often aroused suspicion among such medical
philosophers. Today, people espousing such views of the body, health, sickness, and healing are often said to
possess a ‘naturalist’ view of medicine. See Hankinson, Galen on the Therapeutic Method, 30.
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‘cunning woman,’ early modern healers shared many basic ideas, even if the actors and players
from different social levels expressed them in various discursive and conceptual languages.
Such ideas shall be developed over the next several chapters of this dissertation. In this
brief section, however, I will be satisfied to have re-emphasized, in a fairly elementary fashion,
the fact that the ‘theoretical’ component of humoural medicine subsumed the ‘practical’ in early
modern medical schools. More shall be said about both branches, and the relationship between
them, in the pages that follow. It is to a more detailed examination of the theoretical system that I
shall now turn.
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*
*
Basic medical textbooks used in early modern medical schools generally divided the
theoretical system into three major parts: the study of the ‘naturals,’ the ‘non-naturals,’ and the
‘contra-naturals.’ Galenic ideas regarding health, sickness and healing flowed from a
consideration of these phenomena. As explained above, the concept of the ‘humuor’ came from
Hippocratic texts. Adopted by Galen, the ‘humour’ became the constitutive component of
Galenic, or “humoural theory.” A humour (compositione), the reader will recall, may be best
understood as a physiological concoction of fluid particular to the living organism to which it
belongs; humours represented the specific bodily fluids essential to the physical functioning of
living organisms. The status, nature, and quality of interaction among the bodily humours
governed an organism’s health. As shall be described below, the Galenic system featured four
different humours—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Humours, among other things,
constituted one of the seven ‘naturals.’ The other six included ‘elements,’ ‘qualities,’ ‘members,’
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‘energies,’ ‘operations,’ and ‘spirits.’
The ‘elements’ were four in number: fire, air, water and earth. The quartet dovetailed
neatly with the fundamental elements of matter outlined in Aristotelian philosophy. In this sense,
the human body constituted a microcosm of the universe, an idea common to ancient, medieval,
and early modern natural philosophy. But the elements also contained ‘qualities,’ the third of the
seven ‘naturals.’ ‘Qualities’ described the physical characteristics and nature of substances,
gases, and fluids. Fire was hot and dry, air, hot and moist, water, cold and moist and earth, cold
and dry. The four humours—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—also possessed
qualities. Blood was hot and moist, phlegm, cold and moist, yellow bile hot and dry, and black
bile, cold and dry. Hence, the concept of ‘qualities,’ the third of the seven ‘naturals,’ did not
represent an idea separate and distinct from the other six concepts within its subgroup. The other
six ‘naturals’ possessed ‘qualities,’ while qualities themselves represented one of the seven
‘naturals.’
The rather confusing organization of these conceptual schema should not distort the
following basic points: (1) the human body was composed of the four elements (air, earth, fire,
water), (2) each of the four elements possessed a pair of the four basic qualities (hot and cold,
dry and moist); each element consisted of a combination of two basic qualities, (3) direct
relationships, packed with meaning and implication, existed among and between these sets of
constitutive components.
We have already seen that fire, one of the four elements, combined two qualities, ‘hot’
and ‘dry.’ We have also noted that blood, one of the four humours, combined the qualities of
‘hot’ and ‘moist.’ To complete this introductory set of fundamental relationships, we must note
that the element air was said to correspond to the humour blood, the element water corresponded
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to the humour phlegm, fire corresponded to yellow bile, and earth corresponded to black bile.
One must understand the humoural notion of ‘correspondence’ to properly grasp premodern European medicine. Hence, a brief word of explanation shall be necessary here. In
humoural theory, ‘correspondence’ implies more than similarity, congruity, or any indirect
notion of association or affiliation. Rather, for scholarly pre-modern physicians,
‘correspondence’ implies divine interconnectedness and sacred interrelation. For the humoural
theorist, two things ‘correspond’ when they exert influence upon each other, affect each other, or
respond similarly to certain forces within nature. The relationship between two corresponding
things is fundamental; the integrity of nature’s laws depends upon the consistency and
dependability of the relationship between corresponding properties. Although, to my knowledge,
never explicitly described in any foundational medical text, this principle of correspondence
represents a cornerstone of humoural medicine.
Renaissance medical philosophers combined perceptions of correspondence and
relationships among basic conceptual principles to produce meaning within humoural theory.
This fact becomes clearer if we think of the four elements and the four qualities as fundamental
characters or conceptual building blocks within a system of meaning production. Every basic
principle either ‘corresponded’ to another fundamental character, was constituted by two other
basic concepts, or represented part of the composition of another basic idea. Nancy Siraisi has
complained that “the application of even the most basic concepts of the Galenic system was
often confusing.”7 This fact, of course, stems from the plethora of basic ideas and conceptual
principles at the base of the model and the curious fashion in which they overlap, intersect, and
relate to one another. But the potentially painstaking interdependence of the various concepts
within humoural theory brought a paradoxical beauty to the system—it allowed Renaissance
7
Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and his Pupils, 262. Also see Nutton, Galen: Problems and Prospects, especially chap. 1.
116
medical philosophers to yield a plurality of interpretations regarding physical phenomena,
framed against the backdrop of one eternal relationship: the ‘correspondence’ between the
human body and the heavenly cosmos. The larger ramifications of this point shall be discussed
throughout the balance of this chapter and the rest of this dissertation. For now, however, it shall
be necessary to further outline the basic precepts of humoural theory.
The term ‘complexion,’ or ‘temperament,’ referred to the balance of the qualities, hot,
wet, cold, and dry, resulting from the mixture of the elements within the human body.8 Not
everyone possessed the same quantities or similar distribution of humours. The preponderance of
certain humours over others determined the ‘temperament’ of each individual.9 Health, as shall
be described in greater detail below, depended upon maintenance of proper humoural balance, or
harmonious complexion. Dyskrasia, which may be translated as “disease,” described a state of
humoural imbalance, defying the body’s krasis, or standard constitution and healthy complexion.
Curing a disease involved restoring the natural balance within the body by returning the humours
to their proper “mixing,” or eukrasis. The process of re-balancing the humours had to consider
8
By the sixteenth century, competing medical philosophers issued various interpretations of ancient texts regarding
such things. At the risk of oversimplification, some scholars viewed complexion as arising from the mixture and
integration of the four humours. Others saw complexion as arising from the relationship of the qualities composing
the four humours. For some, the humours did not survive intact when they came together; they were partly
destroyed, but their qualities emerged in the process. Pietro Torrigiano, who published in Venice in 1571, suggested
that this was what Avicenna failed to understand in his famous Canon. In Conciliator, Pietro d’Abano insisted there
was a significant difference between ‘complexions’ and ‘temperaments.’ Ottosson suggests, “the difference between
the simple theory of the four humours [Hippocratic] and the Galenic [humoural theory during the Renaissance]
conception of complexion lies in the fact that the former does not distinguish between the qualities and the substance
of qualities, whereas scholastic medicine emphasizes this difference by applying Aristotelian principles.” See
Ottosson, Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy, 142. That may well be true, but sixteenth-century humanists
undermined many scholastic interpretations. As we have seen in the previous chapter, it was a time of debate and
transition. This chapter shall attempt to convey the most common interpretations in relatively simple fashion. For
more on Torrigiano, see Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and his Pupils, especially 156-168. For more on d’Abano, see
Ottosson, “The Natural Philosophical Foundation: The Idea of Complexio,” in Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy,
129-154. Also see Siraisi’s Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine for a concise discussion of “complexion,”
“temperaments,” and humoural balance; especially 101-103. For a broader treatment of the relationships among the
elements, qualities, and humours, see Klibansky et al., Saturn and Melancholy.
9
These ideas are basic to Hippocratic/Galenic/Humoural theory and can be found in a plethora of texts. See, for
example, Hippocrates, Nature of Man, especially 21-23, and Galen, On the Natural Faculties, xvi. Avicenna’s
Canon, bk. 1, and Joannitius’s Isagoge also feature entire sections on the temperaments.
117
internal and external factors including the patient’s present relationship to nature and the
physical world, his or her lifestyle, and his or her temperament.10 Temperaments themselves, as
explained above, were generally believed to be constituted by humoural complexion.
Returning to the seven ‘naturals’—humours, elements, qualities, members, energies,
operations, and spirits—which constituted one of the three major compartments of the Galenic
theoretical system, we must briefly describe the final four concepts on this list. ‘Members’ refer
to the physical components of the body: the organs, bones, muscles, cartilage, and the like. The
‘principal members’ were the brain, heart, and liver. ‘Fundamental members’ were thought to be
those body parts that provided corporeal structure yet produced no energy or physical
nourishment, such as bones, muscles, and tendons. Certain members depended upon other
members for energy, sustenance, and governance. The concepts of energies and spirits were
curiously interrelated. The ‘energies’ were said to be three in number: ‘animal energy,’ the
‘spiritual’ and the ‘natural.’ Yet, the spirits were also three in number, and two of the three
‘spirits’ referred directly to the ‘energies,’ while the concept of ‘spirits’ itself constituted one of
the three types of energy. The three ‘spirits’ were described as the ‘natural spirit,’ which
originated from the liver, the ‘vital spirit,’ which originated from the heart, and the ‘animal
spirit,’ which had its origin in the brain. For now, it must suffice to say that the ‘energies’
referred to the inanimate forces that inspired the body to perform its basic functions such as
respiration and digestion. The ‘spirits,’ on the other hand, represented substances manufactured
in the heart, liver, and brain via the processing of inspired air. ‘Spirits’ were transmitted
10
Again, these standard ideas gained expression in most important early modern medical texts, although by the late
sixteenth century, a variety of interpretations began to emerge. See Joannitius’s Isagoge, 707-709. For secondary
sources, see Arika, Passions and Tempers, 8. See also Lindemann, Medicine and Society, especially 6-10, and
Porter, Disease, Medicine and Society in England, 18-19. A few of the most common articulations of humoural
theory, as regards the individual’s relationship to the physical environment, shall be explained below.
118
throughout the body by the arteries.11 ‘Spirits’ subsequently compelled, directed, and ordered the
body’s ‘energies,’ which exerted inspirational influence on the body themselves. The concept of
‘operations’ referred to the general functioning and basic activities of the various systems
composing the body. In modern times, ‘operations’ would refer to the constant re-initiation of the
respiratory, circulatory, and digestive system, as well as the overall conduct of physiological
affairs.
‘Non-naturals’ constituted the second of three major subdivisions within the Galenic
theoretical system. The ‘non-naturals’ represent those things in the realm of nature not directly
related to the constitution of the body. The ‘non-naturals’ were six in number: (1) air, (2) sleep
and waking, (3) food and drink, (4) rest and exercise, (5) excretion and retention, and (6) the
passions or emotions. If good health, as briefly described above, depended upon maintaining
proper humoural balance or harmonious complexion, then such balance would be best obtained
by practicing moderation in the indulgence of the six ‘non-naturals.’ A healthy lifestyle
necessitated avoiding exhaustion, overeating, too much alcohol, psychological and emotional
anxiety, excessive passion, and even immoderate cravings. As Mary Lindemann points out, these
sets of ideas were not only fundamental to humoural medicine at university, they were prevalent
11
Late sixteenth-century students would have encountered these ideas in Joannitius’s section entitled “The Spirits”
in Isagoge, 706, and “On the Spirits” in Avicenna’s Canon, bk. 1, 226. For secondary sources, see Siraisi, Medieval
and Early Renaissance Medicine, 101, and Paster, “Nervous Tension: Networks of Blood and Spirit,” 107-124. I
will briefly describe one controversial point here. Galen believed the spirits were transported through a network of
hollow canals within the body thanks to the presence of a gaseous substance called “pneuma.” For Galen, pnuema
represented a certain magical air produced in the heart and dispersed throughout the human body. Healthy
circulation depended upon maintaining an adequate level of pneumatic density. Galen acknowledged that arterial
and venous incisions produced spurts of blood, but he attributed such outpourings to changes in pressure caused by
the cuts themselves. For Galen, the invisible gas pneuma could not be readily observed, but it supported the mostly
hollow network of veins, arteries, and nerves throughout the body. By the late sixteenth century, however, Galen’s
pneumatic theory and his view of the relatively hollow network of veins, arteries, and nerves came under attack.
Vesalian anatomy and Harveian theories of circulation probably undermined such ideas, although contemporaries
were reluctant to declare so in print. Nevertheless, while Galenic theory along pneumatic lines circulated in required
texts, many modern historians think such ideas were dismissed by late Renaissance medical philosophers. Arikha
suggests the “hollow network” theories and pneumatic explanations of circulation were largely discarded by the turn
of the seventeenth century. See Arikha, Passions and Tempers, 25-28. See also Furley and Wilkie, Galen On
Respiration and the Arteries, especially the introduction and chap. 1.
119
in everyday interpretations of health and illness among ordinary Europeans.12 Such
considerations shall be important to this dissertation and will be discussed in greater detail in the
chapters that follow. For now, however, it shall be necessary to offer a few brief remarks about
the ‘non-naturals’ within the framework of humoural theory.
First year student Giacomo Baldini most certainly would have noticed the disparate,
unwieldy nature of the six ‘non-naturals.’ The mixture of unrelated physiological, psychological,
and environmental conditions provided an unusual conceptual basis for theorizing and schematic
knowledge construction. After all, air constitutes a physical property, food and drink represent
nutritional elements, while rest and exercise refer to living activities. Excretion and retention
would appear to represent involuntary physiological activities, unless one considers the extent to
which bodily processes might be affected by maintaining moderation with regards to drinking
and eating. As often is the case, one set of supposedly fundamental Galenic concepts is
inextricably intertwined with another set of ideas from the same theoretical model. Again, the
curious overlapping and interdependence of ideas presented as conceptual building blocks within
humoural theory provides for an unusually flexible system capable of yielding a plurality of
diagnoses and prescriptions regarding health.
But if the relationship among ideas regarding food and drink, rest and exercise, sleeping
and waking, excretion and retention problematized conceptualization within the Galenic system,
ideas regarding the passions and emotions invited thought from outside the physiologically based
model of the body. A regimen demanding moderation of passions and emotions necessitated the
qualification of immoderate wants, the restraint of orientations toward pleasure, the control of
lust and sexual impulses: in short, a form of mental discipline characterized by the policing of
12
Lindemann, Medicine and Society, 10. See also Garcia-Ballester, “On the Origin of the ‘Six Non-Natural Things’
in Galen,” 105-115.
120
human desire. Such a conceptual framework invited spiritual counseling and opened the door to
a wide variety of thought pertaining to “health,” appropriate behavior, and the proper human
activities necessary to maintain a life well lived.13 To be sure, like many ancient, medieval, and
early modern European discursive formations, humoural theory, as interpreted during the
Renaissance, was shot through with spiritual thought and heavily influenced by ideas pertaining
to faith and religious belief. The fact that many modern historians of medicine draw overly sharp
distinctions between “religious healing,” at both learned and everyday levels, and humoural
theory raises questions and considerations for future sections of this dissertation. For now, it
must suffice to say that the Galenic theory of non-naturals opened the doors of humoural
medicine to a wide variety of “external thought”—that is, ideas outside the purely physiological
range of consideration—regarding proper living and healthy lifestyles. The theory of nonnaturals, as interpreted during the Renaissance, helped establish a medical philosophy capable of
yielding a near infinite set of interpretations regarding regimens of health.
‘Contra-naturals’ constituted the third and final part of the Galenic theoretical system.
‘Contra-naturals,’ or things ‘against nature,’ referred to pathological conditions of all kinds, but
if one had to define the concept with a single term within humoural language, the word would be
“disease.” Technically, the ‘contra-naturals’ were three in number: ‘disease,’ the ‘cause of
disease,’ and the ‘concomitants’ or ‘sequels of disease.’ But a cursory glance at Galenic literature
on the ‘contra-naturals’ reveals that the concept refers to a wide variety of sickness. Furthermore,
the translation ‘against nature’ may be taken quite literally when attempting to understand the
humoural concept of ‘contra-naturals.’
Since medicine constituted a subset of natural philosophy, humoural perceptions of
13
Writing in 1608, physician Fabio Paulino argued that sexual intercourse represented a seventh “non-natural.”
Paulino based his arguments upon interpretations of Galen and Avicenna. See Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature,
253.
121
sickness and disease were conceptualized in terms of nature. In Joannitius’s Isagoge, sickness is
defined as a “defect in temperament outside the course of nature, and injuring nature, whence
arises as efficient condition of harm which may be felt.”14 Earning a medical degree from the
University of Padua would testify that the physician understood the intellectual foundations of
‘physic,’ a term derived from the Greek word for nature, ‘ovio.’
The relationship between scholarly Renaissance medicine and natural philosophy, in fact,
may be best illustrated through considerations of sickness and disease. Etymological and
philological considerations represent the best way to go. The Latin word for ‘healer,’ as
commonly used during the early modern period, is medicus. The word may also be translated as
‘medical man,’ or one who practices healing techniques. The Latin word physicus, however,
which represents the root of ‘physician,’ literally means ‘natural philosopher.’15 As we have seen
previously, the university-trained Renaissance medical practitioner viewed himself as one
thoroughly familiar with every major aspect of natural philosophy; hence, every medical doctor
came with an intellectual tool kit loaded with ideas transcending the purely physiological and
corporeal notions of health and healing.
One may push these questions further back by exploring the philological issues at hand.
Isidore of Seville (c. 560-636), whose writings were featured at the University of Padua during
the late sixteenth century, represents an important medieval link between ancient and early
modern natural philosophy. In his great work Etymologies, Isidore defines philosophy as
“knowledge of human and divine matters joined with a zeal for proper living,” listing logica,
ethica, and physica as its principal branches. Isidore identifies physica, as “the investigation of
14
Joannitius, Isagoge, 711.
Harold Cook makes these points in a 1996 essay which emphasizes the relationship between scholarly
Renaissance medicine and natural philosophy with regards to sickness. See Cook, “Physicians and Natural History,”
especially 91.
15
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nature” and “the inquiry concerning causes,” including “the causes of heaven and the power of
natural things.”16 According to Isidore of Seville, the four branches of physica were the liberal
arts of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.
But Isidore’s Etymologies includes a tract entitled De medicina. In this section, Isidore
issues a full account of humoural theory, stressing the relationship between the humours and the
four elements, and the microcosmic/macrocosmic correspondence between the body and the
cosmos. Here, Isidore’s explains medicine’s exclusion from the fundamental branches of
philosophy. “Medicine,” according to Isidore of Seville, “is more comprehensive than the other
liberal disciplines,” because the medicus must be familiar with each of the liberal arts.17 The
doctor must understand arithmetic to comprehend the periodicity of diseases; geometry to
understand the various influences of locales on health; music because of its healing properties;
and astronomy, because of the health-related influences of the stars on the seasons. Isidore
remained faithful to Aristotelian syllogistic logic and stressed the significance of grammar and
rhetoric to the physician.18 Throughout Etymologies he emphasized that philosophy represented
the overarching framework that ordered all the liberal arts, but in De medicina, he suggested that
medicine represented the most comprehensive of the arts. Hence, Isidore concluded De medicina
by designating medicine as “the second philosophy,” or the “philosophy of the body, just as
philosophy is regarded as the medicine of the soul.”19
Medicine was philosophy, and philosophy sought to medicate. But philosophy did not
16
Bylebyl, “The Medical Meaning of Physica,” 24. Bylebyl uses Isidori Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX
2.24.1-16. Also see Sharpe, Isidore of Seville: The Medical Writings, 55-61. I have consulted Isidore’s writings
through a special volume in Harvard University’s History of Science Department entitled “Medicine and Society in
Medieval and Renassiance Europe.” Although this book contains the passages quoted above, it is not a
commercially published volume. Variation in pagination makes citation difficult. Hence, I refer to the Bylebyl and
Sharpe sources.
17
See Bylebyl, “The Medical Meaning of Physica,” 25. Bylebyl uses Isidore, Etymologiae, 4.8.
18
Sharpe, Isidore of Seville: The Medical Writings: An English Translation with an Introduction and Commentary,
published by the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia, 1964), especially 22-28.
19
Bylebyl, “The Medical Meaning of Physica,” 24-25.
123
concern itself with medicine per se. Philosophy concerned itself with nature. Hence, humoural
theory, or ‘medical philosophy,’ would be conceptualized and developed on a stage backed by a
giant mural of the physical world.20 Sickness and disease would be viewed as dysfunctions
between human bodies and the natural world, which constituted, in a sense, transgressions
against nature itself. In fact, at times medical philosophers seemed to think more about nature,
and the style of logic traditionally used to describe physical phenomena, than about the human
body. Nevertheless, medical scholars hammered out a theory of human biology and a
corresponding medical philosophy predicated on “knowledge of human and divine matters
joined with a zeal for proper living.”
*
*
*
*
*
Developing human biological science and a working theory of the body necessitates
raising many fundamental questions. Few are more essential than the differences between the
sexes. Not surprisingly, most humoural texts referred to perceptions of nature when analyzing
sexual differences. In fact, most early modern humoural texts spelled these differences out
clearly and concisely at the outset. Consider the following, from the opening chapter of
Joannitius’s Isagoge:
Of the Difference Between Male and Female
The Male differs from the Female in that he is hotter and more
20
“One had to be a good natural philosopher and a good physician in order to know nature properly,” declared the
scholarly naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi in 1570. See Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific
Culture, 60.
124
dry; she, on the contrary, is colder and more moist.21
Descriptions of difference, or fundamental distinctions, were typically expressed in terms
of the Empedoclean (and later, Aristotelian) ‘qualities,’ hot, cold, moist and dry. As described in
the second major section of this chapter, the four elements, air, earth, fire, and water, believed by
western natural philosophers to constitute all physical matter in the natural world, consisted of
combinations of the four basic qualities (hot and cold, dry and moist). Hence, all matter
ultimately consisted of various combinations of ‘hot,’ ‘cold,’ ‘dry,’ and ‘moist’ qualities, and
that included the human body. The best way to distinguish between the two basic types of human
bodies (male and female) then, would be in terms of their ‘qualitative composition.’ In fact, the
more basic the question, such as sexual difference, the more likely the answer would be
conceptualized with the diametrical opposition of these basic quality pairs.
Similarly, the difference between sickness and health would be explained in terms of the
core qualities, hot, cold, moist, and dry. In a treatise entitled On the Causes of Disease, Galen
wrote, “there are four simple and four composite diseases, arising from an immoderate increase
of the hot and the cold, or from some clash between one or another of these things, such as
between the dry and the moist.” According to Galen, “a combination of such things may increase
together, such as the hot at the same time as the dry, or cold and dry, or hot and moist…[but]
should they increase to such a degree of excess, [they shall] cause a disease.”22 Again, the
opposition of the basic qualities explained physical phenomena.
21
Joannitius, Isagoge, 711. Hunain ibn Ishaq’s ideas on this subject come directly from Hippocrates. They can be
found in Hippocrates’ Aphorisms and The Nature of Man, as well as virtually all texts compiled by Galen, including
Ars Medica and Ars Parva. See Galen of Pergamon, On the Natural Faculties, bk. 1; Hutchins, ed., Hippocrates and
Galen: Great Books of the Western World; and Hippocrates, The Theory and Practice of Medicine, especially the
Introduction by Emerson C. Keller.
22
Galen, “On the Causes of Disease,” cited here in Grant, Galen on Food and Diet, 46. Humoural
conceptualizations of illness and the causes of disease shall be discussed in further detail below. For now, I will be
satisfied to stress the significance of the basic qualities to humoural theorization of sickness.
125
But the second most fundamental question of human biology, which came prior to
considerations of health and sickness, concerned aging. Galen outlined four ages: adolescence,
the prime (juventus), decline (senectus), and decay (senium). The period of adolescence,
according to Galen, was hot and moist, during which the body increases and grows up to the
twenty-fifth or thirtieth year. The prime, which is hot and dry, followed. During this period, “the
body remains in perfection without any diminution of bodily force,” and it lasts from the thirtyfifth to the fortieth year. “Next comes decline,” taught Galen, “which is cold and dry.” During
this period the body begins to lessen and decrease, although the bodily force is not abated, and
the period lasts to the fiftieth or sixtieth year. Decay finally succeeds. “Decay is cold and moist,
with the appearance of the phlegmatic humour, and during this period the bodily forces are
abated, and the period concludes with the end of life.”23 Presumably, the same set of qualitative
phenomena unfolded in the lifespan of a sublunary star or the existence of a tree within the
forest.
How and why should this correspondence be so? The question is most simply answered
by taking a step back and broadly viewing a few ideas within the development of western natural
philosophy. We know Empedocles outlined a theory of matter dependent upon the principles
‘hot,’ ‘cold,’ ‘moist’ and ‘dry’ around the same time the notion of the four elements—‘air,’
‘earth,’ ‘fire,’ and ‘water’—also gained currency (approximately twenty-six centuries ago). We
also know that Hippocrates lived shortly afterwards, when these ideas presumably flourished.
Hence, given the interrelationship between the ‘principles’ and the ‘elements’ within natural
philosophy, it seems reasonable to conclude that Hippocratic humoural theory and the
micro/macro view of the body and the cosmos grew up together. Four centuries later, these ideas
still flourished.
23
Joannitius, Isagoge, 711.
126
In his tome On the Humours, Galen wrote, “To begin at the beginning: the elements from
which the world is made are air, fire, water and earth; the seasons from which the year is
composed are spring, summer, winter and autumn; the humours from which humans and animals
are composed are yellow bile, blood, phlegm and black bile.24 In his later work On the Natural
Faculties, Galen wrote, “the causes by which everything throughout nature is governed are the
Warm, Cold, Dry and Moist.”25 A certain implication resides within these remarks: not only is
the body built out of the four elements, which are themselves composed of various combinations
of the four principles, but the behavior of these elements within the human body corresponds to
the interaction of these elements within nature.
We can reach a comparable if not similar conclusion if we scrutinize the relationships
among conceptual schema within the humoural system, but the result can be less than satisfying.
Readers will recall that within humoural philosophy, though not necessarily natural philosophy,
humours constitute one of the seven ‘naturals.’ The other six ‘naturals,’ as described above,
include ‘elements,’ ‘qualities,’ ‘members,’ ‘energies,’ ‘operations,’ and ‘spirits.’ Elements, of
course, consist of ‘qualities,’ but ‘qualities’ do not represent an idea separate and distinct from
the other six concepts within this subgroup. In fact, the other six ‘naturals’ posses ‘qualities,’
while ‘qualities’ themselves represent one of the seven ‘naturals.’ This is where the curious
overlapping and interdependence of ideas presented as conceptual building blocks within
humoural theory automatically produces correspondence. This system is self-referential in its
linguistic and conceptual organization.
Humoural theory would seem vulnerable to the late nineteenth/early twentieth-century’s
postmodern critique of language. Nietzsche, Foucault, and others would argue that no ‘truth’ or
24
25
Cited from Grant, Galen on Food and Diet, 14.
See Galen, On the Natural Faculties, II, 8-9, in Hutchins, ed., Great Books of the Western World, 197.
127
‘reality’ exists outside of language; instead, malformed perceptions of such things emerge from
within the cracks and fault lines of linguistically determined logic. Derrida would argue that the
words and concepts of humoural theory have no direct correspondence to ‘reality;’ instead, they
correspond to each other. Early modern natural philosophers might have thought their word
games brought them closer to ‘reality,’ but they were simply privileging the conceptual
languages they employed, or the technologies of their own self-fashioning. Trapped within the
webs of language, humoural philosophers had no way of getting outside their linguistically
determined production of meaning.26
Such may be the case. But it is also true that humoural theory did evolve over centuries
and it is possible, in fact quite interesting, to examine developments within such theory to gain a
better appreciation for how and why it developed as it did. Perhaps there can be no ‘post-modern
history.’ But humoural theory has a history, or perhaps many histories, and attempting to
reconstruct a few may help us understand how our ancestors made sense of life and living.
If we recall a basic argument of my first chapter—that Galen developed Hippocratic
humoural theory with Aristotelian logic—we may gain a sense of why Galenic/humoural theory
ultimately concentrated on certain physiological questions. For example, in most standard
Renaissance medical texts—such as Avicenna’s Canon, Joannitius’s Isagoge, and Galen’s Ars
26
Those elements of postmodern theory that concentrated on language, such as the work of Ferdinand de Saussure
and Jacques Derrida, worked out some very complex theoretical critiques. Saussure emphasized the imperfect space
between ‘signifiers’ (words) and the ‘signified’ (that which words profess to represent) and insisted that hidden
transformations and distortions resulted from the use of language. The word ‘fire’ is not literally identical to the hot,
reddish-orange phenomenon it attempts to describe; metaphors and analogies compound the problem while forcing
us to rely more and more on systematic imperfection. For many postmodernists, language represents an impossible
barrier to the truth, as perceptions of reality remain the products of linguistic imperfection. For my purposes, this is
perhaps a complex way of saying that early modern natural philosophers never really achieved any significant
distance from that which they attempted to investigate; instead, they invested perceptions of nature with their own
values and predispositions and articulated preconceived views with fancy, but faulty, linguistic systems. For the
most concise treatment of this subject, see “Postmodernism and the Crisis of Modernity,” in Appleby et al., Telling
the Truth About History, especially 204, 208, 211, and 213. See also Patton and Smith, eds., Jacques Derrida:
Deconstruction Engaged, and Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, as well as Kramer, “Literature, Criticism and
Historical Imagination,” 72-97.
128
Medica—elaborate, complex discussion of human biology featured two closely related issues,
nutrition and digestion. Humoural theory had much to say about the consumption and processing
of food. In fact, the mechanical processes of digestion touched off an entire range of
physiological questions and inferences that struck right at the heart of humoural theory. How
does one thing (food) become another (humoural matter)? Packed with implications regarding
‘matter,’ ‘form,’ and purposeful transformation, the question served Aristotle fans well. Readers
will recall that the great master’s “Theory of the Four Causes”—material, formal, efficient and
final—concerned the physical transformation of things within nature and the cosmological
meaning implicit in such phenomena. Judging by the amount of literature devoted to digestion,
we may say that this subject represented the third most significant component of human biology
within humoural theory.
Pre-modern medical philosophers could not readily see the biochemical processes of
digestion, but they could reach general consensus regarding the influence certain foods had on
the human body.27 Armed with a broad sense of general relationships framed within a model of
cause and effect, medical philosophers developed a body of biological theory. The fact that this
‘biological theory’ was speculative and philosophical did not concern most early modern,
medieval, and ancient thinkers. As a discursive field, biology’s evolution into an empirically
driven science characterized by microscopes and chemical equations remained many years away.
But pre-modern natural philosophers could be quite comfortable with the questions
commonly associated with digestion. The most fundamental Aristotelian logic emphasized how
the question ‘What is this thing’ incurred the larger question ‘What brought this thing into
being?’; pre-moderns could explain how the ‘agent’ that transformed one thing to another was
27
Similarly, pre-modern physicians could not explain the chemical reactions that took place when drugs and
medicaments were introduced into the body, but they could, via collective experience, gain a shared sense of the
impact certain medicinals had on patients.
129
imbued with meaning and purpose. The contemplation of digestion inspired such questions and
ideas. What happened when food entered the body? How did food sustain us? How can we
understand the transformation of food into humoural matter (or whatever it is that sustains us)?
Aristotle suggested the ‘efficient cause’ referred to the agent producing the transition
from material to formal, but inquiries into formal causes always produced the question ‘What is
this object meant to be?’ The ‘final cause’ concerned the purpose for which such action had been
taken. In humoural theory, digestion produced humours. The ‘purpose’ of digestion raised some
exciting considerations.
Hippocrates outlined a theoretical explanation of digestion. Collected in the stomach,
newly ingested food became heated in the initial stages of digestion. While cooking, food began
a slow journey through the veins connecting the stomach to the liver. In the liver, the heating
process finally transformed the food into chyle, a chemical composition unique to human beings.
Thanks to the heat of digestion, chyle combined with the ‘vital spirits’ of the healthy body to
form the humours—blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile—which were exported to the heart
first and the brain afterwards. Such represented the technical explanation inherited by Galen.
With Aristotle’s ‘theory of the four causes,’ Galen, and later generations of medical
philosophers, imbued this explanation with notions of ‘purpose,’ ‘essence’ and cosmological
meaning.
Humours represented the principle and essential components of the human body. Brought
into existence by digestion, humours intiated, maintained, and sustained human physiology. But
in a larger sense, interaction among humours reproduced the natural dynamics of the heavenly
cosmos in human form. Such represented the essence and purpose of humours. Armed with the
full weight of the Aristotelian tradition, Galenic medical philosophers attributed the initiation
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and development of humours to digestion.
Once individually created, the humours collectively interacted; a body’s relative health
depended upon the quality of their perpetual dance. Each humour possessed a color, flavor and
character of its own, yet survival necessitated a certain amount of humoural harmony. Was not
the same true of the relationship between individual citizens and social collectives?
Understanding humoural interaction necessitates a closer look at the characteristics of each
humour. It is to a more thorough examination of blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile that I
shall now turn.
*
*
*
*
*
‘Humoural blood’ originated in the liver. Produced during the process of digestion, the
humour ‘blood’ fundamentally differed from the blood residing within the venous system.
Venous blood helped provide the density necessary to support the body’s physical integrity,
while transporting humours throughout the body. But humoural blood constituted one of the
body’s four physiological pillars. In fact, of the four constituent humours, blood enjoyed perhaps
the most positive image.
Associated with the element ‘air,’ blood represented the most basic, indispensable,
ubiquitous element within the body. A healthy body required quantitative harmony among all the
humours, regardless of their individual composition, but ‘blood’ seemed inherently endowed
with special qualities distinguishing it from phlegm and yellow and black bile. Perhaps because
it commanded a central role in the distribution of the crucial quality ‘heat,’ blood consistently
conjured up images of splendid health. In his initial description of the four humours, Joannitius
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described blood as “the best of them.”28 Centuries earlier, Galen had written “blood produces a
cheerful nature.”29
A great deal may be said regarding the physiological potential of blood within humoural
theory, but the following characteristics remain basic: blood was thought to be thick, dense,
sweet in taste, and red in color. Although fundamentally ‘hot’ and ‘moist’ (both generally
positive qualities), humoural blood somehow possessed the virtue of neutrality; blood did not tip
the body’s scales in any significant qualitative direction. Children and adolescents were believed
to be endowed with large quantities, or high percentages, of humoural blood. Indeed, reading
through Galenic texts, one often gets the impression that the other three humours—phlegm,
yellow bile, and black bile—represent byproducts or offshoots of blood’s production.
Nevertheless, like any humour, too much blood threatened physiological imbalance and ill
health. Danger loomed when blood dominated the body’s other three humours.
Like blood, phlegm was also thick in viscosity. In fact, many basic humoural texts
portray phlegm as a residue formed during the concoction of blood. Phlegm corresponded to
‘water’ in nature. Like water in the physical world, pockets of phlegm emerged everywhere
within the body. Phelgm’s ubiquitous nature sustained life, for physiological processing
depended upon this invaluable fluid. But as an individual humour, phlegm’s negative attributes
seemed to outweigh her positive virtues. Associated with old age, decay, and deterioration, the
presence of phlegm often indicated a disadvantageous set of circumstances. Many common
illnesses, such as the head cold and the fever, announced their unwanted presence with the
appearance of phlegm. A ‘phlegmatic disposition’ or ‘phlegmatic temperament’ generally
described a slow, sluggish, feeble individual. The ‘phlegmatic mind’ lagged behind as well.
28
29
Joannitius, Isagoge, 718.
Galen, On the Humours, cited in Grant, Galen on Food and Diet, 17.
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“Phlegm causes a lazy and stupid nature,” declared Galen.30 Indeed, the negative image
associated with phlegm, or mucus, in modernity, possesses ancient roots.
Physicians associated phlegm—cold and moist, as described above—with ‘winter.’ In an
age that lacked modern heating, where agriculturally determined societies struggled for
sustenance, such an association could be less than flattering.31 Either salty or sweet to the taste,
phlegm remained anything but neutral. Greenish or yellow in color (not to be confused with
‘yellow bile’) phlegm always seemed to be imbued or infested with something; the implication
rarely pleased healers. Expectorants represented the best way to eliminate excessive phlegm.
Physicians generally interpreted streaks of unusual color in urine or bits of seemingly foreign
matter in stool to as signs of rejected phlegm. Nevertheless, the body could not maintain
humoural balance and homeostasis without this cold and moist humour.32
The liver produced yellow bile. Warm, dry, thin, light, buoyant: these represent some of
the adjectives used to describe yellow bile in major humoural texts. Generated during the
production of blood, yellow bile ultimately collected in the gall bladder, although it remained
broadly diffused throughout the body for the sake of humoural balance. Associated with
‘summer,’ youth and adolescence, yellow bile represented the volatile, unrestrained, intemperate
humour.33 “Yellow bile possesses a nature that is angry,” warned Galen.34 Many humuoral texts
refer to yellow bile as chole—the attribute of ‘cholerics,’ who were fierce, quick-tempered,
argumentative and aggressive. In this sense, yellow bile’s association with youth and immaturity
30
Ibid., 17
Humoural medicine’s emphasis on balance notwithstanding, ‘heat’ always enjoyed a more positive connotation
than ‘cold.’ Live bodies were warm; corpses were cold. The humours themselves were concocted, or “cooked,” by
the healthy body’s innate heat.
32
In the standard Paduan textbook Isagoge, Joannitius describes five varieties of phlegm. ‘Salt phlegm,’ ‘sweet
phlegm,’ ‘acrid phlegm,’ ‘glassy phlegm,’ and a fifth type, which he fails to label explicitly, all differ in dominant
qualities, color, and tastes. Needless to say, they all influence the body differently. See Joannitius, Isagoge, “Of
Phlegm,” 705.
33
Gruner, A Treatise on the Canon, 656.
34
Galen, On the Humours, cited in Grant, Galen on Food and Diet, 17.
31
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seems natural and self-evident. Indeed, humoural philosophers believed yellow bile to be
prominent in young bodies, less so during middle age, and sparse in older folks.
Such simplicity exists within humoural texts. But confounding complexity exists as well.
In fact, with regard to “color,” Galen identified seven types of “yellow” bile. “There is yellow,
which people call basic,” explained the Pergamonian, “but there are pale-yellow, red, leek-green,
yolk-yellow, verdigris and woad too.”35 For this reason, ‘yellow bile’ is sometimes referred to as
‘red bile’ in humoural texts.36 Such medical books rarely emphasize the differences among the
various types of ‘yellow bile,’ but a practitioner seeking to render alternative interpretations can
find much to work with in Galenic literature.37 Not surprisingly, many modern secondary sources
mistakenly locate yellow bile’s production in the gall bladder.38 Perhaps it is appropriate that
yellow bile tasted ‘bitter,’ for its existence confounded many students of humoural medicine.
When overheated, yellow bile converted to black bile and sickness ensued. Left to exist
in proper, healthy proportion to the other humours, yellow bile helped fortify the venous blood
dispersed throughout the body. But the quirky, unpredictable, fierce, insolent connotation
attached to yellow bile implied danger for a system fully dependent upon balance, equilibrium,
and harmony.
Galen considered black bile “a topic over which some have spent far longer than
necessary for the art of medicine.” But Galen himself wrote an entire treatise entitled On Black
35
Ibid., 16. Also see Galen, On the Natural Faculties, xix.
See Joannitius, Isagoge, 701, for example. Many other examples exist.
37
“The transformation of phlegm into blood is achieved by innate heat, as external heat only putrefies the material
and decomposes it,” wrote Avicenna, in a text commonly used at Padua during the Renaissance. “Yellow bile does
not have this function,” claimed the medieval Muslim scholar, “since unlike phlegm it is not converted into blood by
innate heat; but it resembles phlegm in undergoing putrefaction and decomposition under the influence of external
heat.” See Gruner, A Treatise on the Canon, 30, taken from “Doctrine IV, Book I: What a Humour Is, and What
Kinds There Are.” This explanation does not seem easily reconciled with Galen’s discussion of yellow bile in On the
Humours, yet both texts were valued at Padua during the Renaissance.
38
See, for example, Arikha’s otherwise fine volume, Passions and Tempers, 10. Isidore of Seville suggested that
yellow bile was generally separated from the blood of the portal vein, passed on to the gall bladder and thence to the
duodenum. See Sharpe, “Isidore of Seville: The Medical Writings,” 55-64.
36
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Bile.39 During the early modern period, medical philosophers followed suit, consistently
theorizing about the ‘dark humour.’ A few basic ideas will suffice here: black bile emerged
during the concoction of blood or yellow bile. Such production generally took place in the liver,
although black bile occurred elsewhere in the body. Ultimately stored in the spleen, black bile
remained ‘cold’ and ‘dry.’ Associated with autumn, black bile represented the humour of
‘maturity.’ Perhaps most famously, black bile, or melaina chole, became associated with the
‘melancholic’ disposition. The melancholic tended to be self-contained, introspective, quiet, shy,
and sheepish. But too much black bile, or conspicuous melancholy, could easily mean delirium,
madness and insanity. “No fly or other living creature would wish to have a taste of black bile,”
warned Galen.40
If blood enjoyed the most positive image among the humours, black bile suffered the
worst. Black bile represented the only humour explicitly derived from previous humours, even if
scholars argued about the specific creation of melaina chole. Conspicuously high percentages of
black bile caused death. Although half of nature’s ‘quality’ quartet, black bile’s constitutive
features, ‘cold’ and ‘dry,’ generally possessed negative physiological connotations. The body
lost heat with age and dried up in death.
Nevertheless, black bile closely resembled humoural blood. Indeed, according to most
interpretations, black bile owed its existence to blood. Joannitius divided black bile into two
forms, ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal,’ suggesting “the normal form is the sediment or residue of good
blood.”41 Feeling compelled to distinguish between the two humours, Galen wrote “black bile
remains distinct from blood in that it does not congeal.” Black bile did escort undesirable
39
Galen, On Black Bile, cited in Grant, Galen on Food and Diet, 19 for the quote, 19-37 for the treatise. Naturally,
Galen had a good deal more to say about black bile in publications such as Ars Parva and Ars Medica.
40
Galen, On Black Bile, cited in Grant, Galen on Food and Diet, 22.
41
Joannitius, Isagoge, 718.
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elements out of the body, however, during several physiological processes. In healthy bodies,
black bile ‘purified’ humoural blood.42 But overly dark blood implied sickness. The implication
corresponded well with black bile’s negative image.
In summation, one must remember that each humour corresponded to two of the basic
qualities associated with its element. Blood corresponded to air and featured ‘hot’ and ‘wet’
qualities. Phlegm corresponded to water and remained ‘wet’ and ‘cold.’ Yellow bile’s element
was fire, and ‘hot’ and ‘dry’ constituted its qualities. Earth corresponded to black bile; ‘cold’ and
‘dry’ represented the dark humour’s qualities. The diagram on the following page illustrates
these relationships.
42
Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine, 106. Joannitius suggested, “the useful portion of black bile
draws the blood together, thickening and strengthening it.” See Joannitius, Isagoge, 718.
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Summer
Yellow Bile
Chlorine
Fire
Youth
Hot
Dry
Spring
Blood
Sanguine
Air
Childhood
Autumn
Black Bile
Melancholic
Earth
Adulthood
Wet
Cold
Winter
Phlegm
Phlegmatic
Water
Old Age
The Humoural System43
43
This sort of diagram did not commonly appear in ancient, medieval or early modern texts. Instead, many premodern texts expressed relationships within humoural theory through the use of convoluted arrows and lines.
Images like the one shown above convey the basic ideas more clearly and have been used in modern secondary
sources. For one like it, see Wear, Knowledge & Practice in English Medicine, 38.
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A person could live a century under the relative domination of any humour, provided the
subordinate humours were adequately represented. Even the body dominated by black bile might
see old age. Such a person would be ‘melancholic,’ but could be generally healthy nonetheless.
A person could live with yellow bile’s relative dominance too; blood and phlegm might also
enjoy the advantage in a fairly healthy individual. Problems arose when the ‘cold’ became frigid,
or the ‘hot’ boiled over, or the ‘dry’ became parched and the ‘moist’ downright wet.44
Although general balance or broad equilibrium represented the key to health in a system
predicated on harmony and order, virtually all human bodies experienced relatively minor
disequilibrium. In fact, perfect humoural balance represented a near impossibility. The finely
tuned, ultra-sensitive human body experienced change with each deep breath, every bit of food
or drink, and each deep thought. The constant flux represented a good thing too, for the final
curtain descended when the humours stopped dancing.45
Flux, of course, implied action, fluidity, and perpetual motion. For the humoural
philosopher, the body constituted a living hydraulic system characterized by the constant swirl of
liquid matter. William Harvey’s theories of arterial and venous circulation brought great
controversy around the turn of the century; his pumping heart shot blood through a network of
corporeal highways unlike anything described by the ancients; but humoural philosophers had
always assumed movement and transience of bodily matter.46 In fact, health directly reflected the
44
These basic ideas reside within virtually every major humoural text. See, for example, Avicenna’s Canon,
especially Doctrine 4, chap. 1, “What a Humour Is, and What Kinds There Are,” 91-95. See also Hippocrates V,
“Diseases,” I, 2, vol. 5, especially 102-104.
45
Galen called the vital ongoing interaction among humours “disharmonic mixing.” Most commentators interpreted
his remarks to mean that constant humoural activity kept the body alive. “It is vital that the humours change,” wrote
Galen, “just as the elements must change into one another, not always keeping the same process of change, or
maintaining a balanced increase.” See Galen, On the Humours, cited in Grant, Galen on Food and Diet, 15.
46
From Hippocrates down through Aristotle, Galen, the medieval era, and the early centuries of the Renaissance,
humoural philosophers generally believed blood seeped through pores within the heart, much like water through a
sponge. The idea of a pumping heart, which shot freshly nourished blood around the body, only to have such blood
return, would have been foreign to Galen. Although humours were thought to be exported by the stomach and liver
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efficiency with which the fluids of life traveled through the living organism.
Coughing, sneezing, and shivering all reflected hydraulic congestion. It would take “germ
theory” and perceptions of bacteria to understand sneezing as the physical elimination of
undesirable foreign elements. In the sixteenth century, the sneeze represented a bodily reaction to
obstruction of perfectly natural matter. The physical exasperation associated with sneezing
reflected the frustration of congestion, blockage, or some dysfunctional delay. Although quite
common, constipation struck fear in the hearts of victims. The irregular body’s assembly line
failed to process; extended breakdowns had grim implications. Not surprisingly, purgatives and
evacuations represented common approaches to restoring productive order.47
Nevertheless, in spite of all the movement, most bodies featured a distinguishable
disposition. In fact, a body’s ‘dominant temperament’ could be largely predetermined. Two
phlegmatic parents rarely produced a non-phlegmatic child. But a ‘dominant temperament’ might
evolve as well. Sufficient time spent eating and drinking certain things, thinking certain thoughts
and feeling certain feelings, under the influence of a particular clime, might seal one’s fate as a
generally melancholic, choleric, sanguine, or phlegmatic individual. But ‘temporary
temperaments’ could emerge in contradiction to one’s generally ‘dominant temperament.’ With
the right combination of behavior and experience, a body’s typical humoural disposition might
be temporarily overcome; a phlegmatic individual could experience sanguinity, a melancholic
person might become choleric, and so on. Fortunately, such changes rarely lasted long, for these
variations essentially constituted “sickness.”
Nevertheless, the humoural body’s relative health varied plenty. The question “How are
through the body’s transmission system, venous and arterial circulation of blood was not understood prior to the late
Renaissance. As described above, certain “spirits” were thought to travel throughout the body, but they did so
through a largely hollow system of veins.
47
Such things will be described in greater detail in the section on therapeutic methods below.
139
you feeling today?” carried greater significance in centuries past. A closer examination of those
factors influencing humoural dynamics shall be the focus of the next section.
*
*
*
*
*
“I think that one cannot know anything certain about nature from any other quarter than
from medicine,” wrote Hippocrates, in approximately 400 BC. “This knowledge is be attained
when one comprehends the whole subject of medicine properly, but not until then.”48 In his first
great medical tome, entitled On Ancient Medicine, Hippocrates established the basic principles of
his ‘humoural theory,’ thoroughly grounding his ideas in one basic principle: understanding man
represents the key to understanding nature and the universe. Years later, in Nature of Man,
Hippocrates would operate from the same principle, but with a slightly different emphasis. Now,
understanding how man’s body corresponded with natural phenomena represented the central
challenge of humoural theory. The humours varied according to the season—blood increased in
spring and summer, whereas both yellow bile and black bile increased toward autumn. Phlegm
increased in winter and decreased in summer, because it was “the coldest constituent of the
body.”49 A crucial relationship within humoural theory gained articulation and emphasis—the
nature, organization, and interaction among the body’s humours corresponded to external
dynamics; forces outside the body directly influenced human physiology. Factors such as season,
climate, and diet affected one’s humoural disposition. Broad and wide with great potential for
expansion, the humoural theory of the body took on a rather malleable shape.
Approximately 400 BC, some say Hippocrates, some say an unknown author writing
48
49
The Genuine Work of Hippocrates. See On Medicine, pt. 20.
Nature of Man, VII, in Hippocrates IV, 23-24.
140
under the great master’s pen name, published a treatise entitled Airs, Waters, and Places. In this
text, the influence of climate, seasonal change, topography, and vegetation on humoural
constitution and, consequently, the human organism, gained further elaboration. “For with the
seasons,” wrote this ancient author, “the digestive organs of men [and hence, the humoural
constitution of men] undergo change.”
As the season and the year advances, the doctor can tell what epidemic
diseases will attack a particular city, either in summer or winter, and what
each individual may experience from the change of living regimen.
Knowing the change of seasons, and how each takes place, he will know
beforehand what type of year shall ensue. Having made these
investigations, and knowing beforehand the seasons, he becomes acquainted
with each particular, and he may succeed in the preservation of health and
the practice of his art.50
Like many totalizing systems of explanation, it all seemed too broad to yield meaningful
insight. But Hippocrates, or perhaps one of his students, labored on, providing specific detail and
graphic examples of the ideas described above. In Part III of Airs, Waters, and Places, the
ancient author declared:
“[S]o that the aforementioned things should be understood in a clear manner, I shall
now explain….A city exposed to hot winds (these are between the wintry rising, and
50
The Genuine Work of Hippocrates; see Airs, Waters, and Places, pt. 2, 1. See also Mattock and Lyons, trans.,
Hippocrates: On Endemic Diseases, 56-57.
141
the wintry setting of the sun), and to which these are peculiar, but which is sheltered
from the north winds; shall have plenteous and saltish waters; the heads of the
inhabitants shall be of a humid and pituitous constitution, and their bellies subject to
frequent disorders, owing to the phlegm running down from the head; the forms of their
bodies, for the most part, shall be rather flabby.
Did nature and climate directly determine body and health? The doctor seemed to think
so. In describing the fate of such a place he wrote, “the following diseases are peculiar to such a
city: the women are sickly and subject to excessive menstruation; many become unfruitful from
disease and have frequent miscarriages.” Those children that survived birth were not so well off
either. “Infants suffer attacks of convulsions and asthma,” declared the ancient physician. “Males
are subject to dysentery, diarrhea, hepialus, chronic fevers in winter, or epinyctis, and of
hemorrhoids of the anus.” Such problems yielded some advantages, however, as the physician
declared, “Pleurisies, ardent fevers, peripneumonies, and common acute diseases rarely occur,
for such diseases are not apt to prevail where the bowels are loose.”51
Such might be the fate of the inhabitants within the city described above. But life within
that particular city determined their collective health. Temperaments, complexion, and basic
krasis of the body were entirely impressionable, but not necessarily fixed. In fact, the human
krasis was anything but fixed. Like the clouds in the sky and the depth of the tides, humoural
constitution consistently varied. Over five centuries after the publication of Airs, Waters and
Places, Galen expounded upon such ideas. “A particular humour might on occasion
metamorphose into one or another sort of humour according to temperature, time, place, age and
51
The Genuine Work of Hippocrates; see Airs, Waters, and Places, pt. 3, 12 (for both block quotations featured
above).
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diet: for all humours arise and increase at every moment and season.” In his treatise On the
Humours, Galen wrote, “In summer there is a predisposition towards bitter bile, especially
among those people who have leanings towards this condition through age, constitution, diet or,
above all, through external factors.” Black bile might be generated under similar conditions, but
according to Galen, “the surrounding circumstances are even more complicated.”52
Indeed, the more Galen expounded upon the concepts of temperaments and complexion,
the more he linked the physiological to the environmental. In treatises such as On the Causes of
Disease, The Temperaments, and his final book, The Faculties of the Soul, Galen emphasized
specific relationships between the physical world and the relative health of its inhabitants.
Convinced that Hippocrates himself had written Airs, Waters, Places, Galen devoted the final
years of his life to hammering out a systematic theory of environmentally determined health.53
All such works would be studied closely at the University of Padua during the late Renaissance.
One “external factor” of great significance, of course, would be diet. Several sections
above, we saw how and why the phenomena of digestion demanded strong attention from premodern medical philosophers; ideas concerning the assimilation of foreign substances within the
body fit neatly with Aristotelian logic regarding considerations of ‘form’ and ‘matter,’ ultimately
centering the question “how does one thing become another” at the heart of humoural discourse.
Such were the theoretical underpinnings of humoural philosophy and they transcended mere
questions of human health. But the influence of diet on the body, as compared to the significance
of digestion to humoural theory, may also be readily examined and understood.
Galen suggested, “the prime causes of yellow bile are stress, anger, emotional trauma,
labor, physical exercise and insomnia,” but he also added “fasting and hunger” to the mix.
52
53
Galen, On the Humours, cited in Grant, Galen on Food and Diet, 15.
See Wasserstein, ed., Galen’s Commentary on the Hippocratic Treatise, especially the Introduction.
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“Phlegmatic bile comes about from sleep, drinking water, the consumption of sea food and most
diets in general, and viscous edibles that consist of thick particles,” wrote the ancient
Pergamonian. “Blood is generated by meat, fowl, eggs and all those foods that are both
wholesome and easy to cook.”54
Hippocrates had written that “every physician must strive to know, if he wishes to
perform his duties, what man is in relation to the articles of food and drink [he consumes], and to
his other occupations, and what are the effects of each of them to every one.” According to
Hippocrates, it is “not sufficient to know that a certain article of food is bad, but what sort of
disturbance it creates, and wherefore, with what principle in man it disagrees.”55 An important
implication emerged: in humoural philosophy, food was held to be assimilated by the body,
whereas medicine, as we shall see in later chapters, was thought to assimilate the body to itself.56
In the late sixteenth century, university medical students would study many ideas about
digestion directly from the pages of Joannitius. Reading through the Isagoge, one sees how little
had changed from ancient down through medieval and early modern times:
Of Foods
Foods are of two kinds. Good food is that which brings about a good humour, and bad
food is that which brings about an evil humour. That which produces a good humour is
that which generates good blood; namely that which is in the mean state as regards
quality (commixio) and working. Such is clean, fresh, fermented bread and the flesh of
lamb. Bad food brings about the contrary state, such as old bread, or the flesh of old
54
Galen, On the Humours, cited in Grant, Galen on Food and Diet, 15.
The Genuine Work of Hippocrates; see On Medicine, pt. 20.
56
Siraisi makes this general point, although not with regards to early Hippocratic writing, in her book on the early
modern medical philosopher Taddeo Alderotti. See Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, 161-162.
55
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goats. Foods producing good or evil humours may also be heavy or light. Of the first
kind are pork and beef, of the second chicken, or fish. And of these the flesh of the
middle-sized and more active kinds is better than that of the fatter and scaly varieties.
Certain kinds of vegetables produce evil humours, for instance, nasturtium, mustard,
and garlic beget reddish bile. Lentils, cabbage, and the meat of old goats or beeves
produce black bile. Pork, lamb, purslain, and the attriplex beget phlegm. Heavy foods
produce phlegm and black bile, light food produces reddish bile, and either of these is
evil.57
And so on. A great many ideas regarding the influence of food, appearing in itemized
fashion, may be found in early modern humoural texts. But the relationship between diet and
health meant less to Renaissance physicians than it does to modern doctors. Our modern science
of nutrition would strike early modern medical philosophers as misguided and poorly conceived.
For them, the consumption of particular food, in and of itself, could not possibly yield significant
influence on the body, unless considered in conjunction with other factors affecting health.
Despite the unambiguous language of the passage cited above, most humoural texts qualified the
influence of food with contextual questions of climate, season, the alignment of heavenly bodies
above and the state of the consumer’s mind below.58 In fact, the ancient Greek meaning of “diet”
transcended the consumption of food and drink. “Diet” referred to the regulation of life’s basic
activities—striking a balance between work and leisure, sleep and activity, rest and exercise—
57
Joannitius, Isagoge, 708.
“In bodies which are warm either through nature, disease, time of life, season of the year, locality or occupation,”
wrote Galen, “eating honey is productive of bile, whereas in opposite circumstances it produces blood.” See Galen,
On the Natural Faculties, II, 8-9, in Hutchins, ed., Great Books of the Western World, 195.
58
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such were the ambitious goals of a healthy diet.59 While Hippocrates had suggested that the
skilled physician must know “what man is in relation to the articles of food and drink he
consumes,” in the same sentence he emphasized the significance of “man’s other occupations,
and the effects of each of them to the sum of man.”60 By “other occupations,” the good doctor
meant the sum total of those things one experienced, felt, touched, and thought during the course
of life.
In fact, Galen’s observations regarding the significance of the psyche on physical health
would be more thoroughly emphasized than nutrition during the early modern period. The
emotional and affective dimension of physical health filled thousands of pages in Renaissance
medical texts. The Cartesian distinction between mind and body gained little or no expression
within early modern humoural theory. It is to a brief discussion of what today might be called the
psychological side of humoural medicine that we shall now turn.
*
*
*
*
*
Modern psychology, of course, began to take shape in the late nineteenth century. Our
ancient, medieval and early modern ancestors used the term ‘psychology’ to mean the study of
the soul. As we saw in Chapter 1, ancient natural philosophers and their early modern
counterparts did not use the word ‘soul’ in the same spirit as later theologians. Instead, for
doctors of yesteryear, the ‘soul’ referred to the mind and its various functions, which included
physiological operations. Simply put, the mind and the body tended to be thoroughly integrated
in pre-modern perceptions of the human being.
59
60
See Pomata, Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law, 60.
The Genuine Work of Hippocrates; see On Medicine, pt. 20. See also Precope, Hippocrates on Diet and Hygiene.
146
Like modern human biologists, physicians, and psychiatrists, humoural philosophers
believed that mental thoughts and emotional feelings incurred physical reactions within the body.
In his summation of Galen, Joannitius writes:
Sundry affections of the mind produce an effect within the body, such as those which
bring the natural heat from the interior of the body to the outer parts or the surface of
the skin. Sometimes this happens suddenly, as with anger; sometimes gently and
slowly, as with delight and joy. Some affections, again, withdraw the natural heat and
conceal it either suddenly, as with fear and terror, or again gradually, as poverty. And
again some affections disturb the natural energy both internal and external, as, for
instance, grief.
But for the humoural philosopher, the relationships among thoughts, feelings, and
physiological dynamics within the body represented more than harmless coincidences. Indeed,
thinking and feeling constituted crucial aspects of physical health. As briefly described in the
second major section of this chapter, “passions and emotions” represented the sixth category of
Galen’s ‘non-naturals.’ Good health depended upon maintaining proper humoural balance or
harmonious complexion and such order necessitated moderation with regards to the six ‘nonnaturals.’ A healthy lifestyle required avoiding, among other things, what we moderns might
describe as psychological and emotional anxiety.
In Joannitius’s Isagoge, Giacomo Baldini and his late sixteenth-century classmates would
study the same set of ideas. Joannitius referred to the “affections of the mind” as the “sixth basic
147
cause of the relation between health and sickness.”61 In an introductory section entitled “Of the
Regimen of Health,” Joannitius wrote:
The regimen of health is of three kinds according as it deals with those prone to illness,
those just beginning to be ill, and weakly persons. The first classes are treated by proper
regulation of the aforesaid six things, for example the six non-naturals.
Those in the second class are treated in two ways: first, by removal of the excess
humour; secondly, by repairing any defect in nature and by counseling adherence to the
proper observance of the non-naturals.62
The “proper observance of the non-naturals” generally entailed the qualification or
modification of one or more activities on Galen’s list. With moderation as the operational virtue,
‘passion’ quickly became the target of suspicion. Then, as now, the concept of ‘passion’
possessed a connotation of excess, immoderate or unwieldy dimension. To feel passion meant to
be overwhelmed by emotion; to be passionate implied overdoing, or exceeding the bounds of
conventional behavior.
In his treatise, The Passions and Errors of the Soul, Galen equated ‘passion’ with
irrationality. Passion resulted from impoverished thought and the misguided feelings
accompanying such activity. A healthy lifestyle necessitated emancipation from one’s passions;
eliminate anger, fear, desire, jealousy, hate—good health shall emerge when only harmony
remains. ‘Reason,’ or the opposite of irrationality, represented the great instrument within this
theater of health. As a trained logician, the scholarly physician relied upon reason, and the
61
Indeed, Joannitius relayed Galen’s theory of the “six non-naturals” very closely. See Joannitius, Isagoge, “Of the
Causes of Health and Sickness,” 711.
62
Ibid., 714.
148
mental health of a patient constituted a basic responsibility. Gianna Pomata suggests that for the
ancient Greek physician and his early modern emulator, control of the emotions and passions
that affected physical health fell under the rubric of diet.63 Modern general practitioners refer
patients to psychologists and psychiatrists for particular treatment; in previous centuries the
thoughts and feelings generated in the mind constituted the domain of the regular physician. The
general practitioner dealt routinely dealt with such things.
The Renaissance doctor might encourage his unhealthy patient to think through the
irrational nature of his current state of mind. Like a modern psychologist, the pre-modern
physician sought to adjust the patient’s relationship with his own thoughts in the hope of
emancipating the victim from mental anguish. Undermine the sources of mental anxiety, so the
strategy goes, and health improves. No great distinction between mental health and physical
health existed; they were so inextricably intertwined as to be indistinguishable.
As Noga Arikha has written, “the physiological and psychological theory of the four
humours emerged out of assumptions about the material basis of our passions and thoughts.”
According to Arikha, the idea that passions represented organic events, in which the dynamics of
the body affected the soul and vice-versa, constituted a central feature of humoural theory. “The
bloody occurrences of Greek tragedy,” writes Arikha, “were rooted in a mythical culture where
diviners could read meaning into the configuration of potent organs. The science of medicine
would be built upon this culture; the humoural system provided a rational scheme that
encompassed passions, illness, blood and guts, ordering the darkness and disorder of inner
life.”64 A fuller account might stress the harmony and beauty of happy thoughts, good feelings,
and human optimism, for such things occupied an equally important place within humoural
63
64
See Pomata, Contracting a Cure, 60.
Arikha, Passions and Tempers, 9.
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theory. Indeed, humoural theory represented a positive, hopeful style of philosophical discourse,
characterized by reverence and appreciation for the natural world and the human body that
mirrored it.65
But the natural world possessed near-infinite complexity, and the implications of such
upon pre-modern medicine were strong. During the later Renaissance, natural philosophers from
many walks of life turned their attention to the physical world with greater focus than ever
before. As a result, medicine became more environmentally determined.66 In 1540, by order of
the Venetian Republic, the University of Padua opened a botanical gardens dedicated to
medicinal development.67 Other major European states followed suit. Medical philosophers
continued to debate the “psychological” side of the discipline, but environmentally determined
healing, or approaches to curing illness predicated upon medicines derived from the physical
world, grew by leaps and bounds.
The newfound appreciation for nature and the physical world brought complexity to the
65
A series of anachronistic assumptions detract from Arikha’s analysis. The shocking, startling, and potentially
upsetting qualities assigned to the human interior, or “blood and guts,” is a relatively modern phenomena, not
necessarily shared by significant percentages of early modern, medieval, or ancient peoples. Hence, the “darkness
and disorder of inner life,” which may well constitute an important part of Greek tragedies, may not necessarily
correspond to the overall nature and general outlook of humoural theorists. Nevertheless, Arikha deserves credit for
emphasizing “assumptions about the material basis of our passions and thoughts,” for such ideas do seem to reside at
the heart of humoural philosophy.
66
In her book Possessing Nature, Paula Findlen suggests that the sixteenth and seventeenth century witnessed a
newfound appreciation of nature among scholarly European philosophers. According to Findlen, natural
philosophers began to investigate nature like never before. “Sixteenth and seventeenth-century naturalists perceived
nature to be a text,” explains Findlen. “Reading the ‘book of nature,’ which contained the key to unlock the secrets
of the universe, was one of the primary activities for early modern natural philosophers” (see 55 and 92). In her sixth
chapter, entitled “Museums of Medicine” (241-287), Findlen suggests the newfound emphasis on the natural world
had fantastic implications for scholarly medicine. Healing and the art of medicine became more environmentally
determined. “From a variety of different perspectives,” writes Findlen, “physicians, apothecaries, and professors of
medicine all perceived collecting [the study of the physical world] to be integral to the advancement of medical
knowledge” (245). According to Findlen, “increased interest in collecting and studying nature redefined the scope of
[legal] authority with regards to the regulation of pharmacy….the new legitimacy of natural history as a field of
study gave physicians added credentials to inspect medicines” (247). Findlen concludes that “by the end of the
sixteenth-century, no candidate for a medical degree in Italy could graduate without knowing something about
natural history….natural history had become part of the ‘expertise’ required to become a physician” (247).
67
The botanical gardens at the University of Padua shall be discussed in more detail in my chapter on drugs and the
medical marketplace.
150
Renaissance philosopher’s theory of the body. While scholars developed new ideas about nature,
the ancient notion regarding the relationship between the physical world and the human body
held strong. In a sense, the working theory of the body became informed by a wider, deeper, and
broader set of sources. If temperaments, complexions, and the basic krasis of the body remained
fluid in the ancient and medieval world, such things would be anything but fixed in early modern
times. Rather, they were, as Noga Arikha observes, “an aspect of nature’s variability.”68
How humoural philosophers understood “nature’s variability” represented another
question. What ordered the various phenomena observed within the physical world? Was there
order? Interpretations varied.
A thorough investigation of cosmological belief among humoural philosophers is beyond
the scope of this dissertation. Nevertheless, a few words must be said about one potentially
heuristic system and explanatory framework significant to medicine throughout ancient,
medieval, and early modern times: astrology. Giacomo Baldini would not study “astrological
medicine” at the University of Padua; such discourse resided a bit lower on the social scale of
early modern European healing. But astrology still represented an integral part of scholarly
medical philosophy during the late Renaissance. Understanding how and why necessitates taking
a step back and viewing the essence of humoural theory a bit more broadly.
*
*
*
*
*
We have seen that Isidore of Seville, writing in the sixth century AD, considered
astronomy one of the four branches of physica and suggested that all medical practitioners
“understand astronomy because of the health related influences of the stars on the seasons.”
68
Arikha, Passions and Tempers, 14.
151
Isidore did not represent the first natural philosopher to propose such ideas. After describing the
significance of natural phenomena within the physical world on human health, the ancient author
of Airs, Waters and Places explains, “if it shall be thought that these things belong rather to
meteorology, it must be admitted, that astronomy contributes not a little, but a very great deal,
indeed, to medicine.”69 Hippocrates discussed astrology/astronomy in his earliest works; Galen
followed suit when expounding upon the great master.70
As Anthony Grafton explains, in ancient times, most learned medical practitioners would
not prescribe a remedy or perform a surgical operation, at least in theory, except at an
astrologically determined propitious time. By the late antiquity, astrologers and astronomers had
produced a wealth of esoteric literature with major implications for healers.71 Like most
scholarly knowledge produced during the heyday of ancient Greece and Rome, however, this
literature suffered neglect from the end of the fifth through the beginning of the eleventh
centuries.
Nevertheless, by the late eleventh century, when Islamic scientific texts gained currency
in the West, astronomy and astrology flourished once again. “In the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries,” writes Grafton, “astrology became a standard part of the curriculum in universities
with medical schools.”72 Indeed, Giacomo Baldini would study the heavenly bodies at Padua
during the 1560s as part of his general education and during his years of focused medical
training.
Many modern people view astrology as a pseudo-science, a silly discourse, or a
conceptual language for the confused. But previous generations of scholarly westerners
69
The Genuine Work of Hippocrates; see On Airs, Waters, and Places, II, 2.
The Genuine Work of Hippocrates; see On Medicine, pt. 15. Also see Galen, On the Humours, in Grant, Galen on
Food and Diet, 19-21.
71
Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, 42.
72
Ibid., 42.
70
152
considered astrology serious science. Astrology represented the practical branch of astronomy;
indeed, in classical times and during the early modern period, the two terms were used almost
interchangeably. During the Renaissance, astrology could be succinctly defined as the study of
the ways in which the celestial bodies affected terrestrial phenomena. Astrologers studied the
influence of stars and planets on the natural elements composing the physical world. Such
questions generated tremendous interest and attracted widespread attention during the early
modern period.
It is not difficult to understand the centrality of astrology to the various disciplines at
Renaissance university. Astrology, or the questions and issues with which astrologers concerned
themselves, included sets of ideas fundamental to the Renaissance conception of the universe.
Learned Europeans conceived of the world and explained its workings to themselves with
principles central to the art of astrology. The close ties between the central assumptions of
astrology and the cosmological views of Renaissance scholars brings us back to the
microcosm/macrocosm principle which viewed the “little world of man” as a miniaturized
version of the larger cosmos. If we add the Empedocledian, and later Aristotelian, notion that all
terrestrial matter was composed of earth, water, air, and fire and that these elements also have
their ‘correspondents’ in the four humours of the human body, we bring another piece to the
puzzle. If we recall the Aristotelian relationship between the corruptible elemental world below
and the superior celestial world above, we have virtually completed the explanatory picture.73
Man constituted a small-scale replica of the larger cosmos. The various elements of the cosmos
were mixed in man; hence, dynamic interaction among the cosmos could conceivably
“communicate” with man. Here, we have the humoural theory of ‘correspondence,’ briefly
73
According to Aristotle, the superior celestial world above emanated influences upon the corrupt, imperfect, and
entirely impressionable elemental, or terrestrial, world below.
153
described above in the third section of this chapter, exemplified in greater detail. Simply put,
because man was composed of the basic elements, and because these elements were ruled by the
superior powers of the aetherial realm, man too, remained subject to the influences of the stars.
Such logic sent a wide variety of pre-modern scholars back to the classical astrological
texts of antiquity. The most authoritative sources concerning astrology in ancient, medieval, and
early modern times, both in Islamic civilization and the Latin West, were probably Ptolemy’s
Almagest and Tetrabiblos. In these works, Ptolemy describes the physical principles upon which
both branches of study would be based. In discussing astrology’s use for medical philosophers,
Ptolemy writes:
If a man knows accurately the movements of all the stars, the sun, and the moon, so that
neither the place nor the time of any of their configurations escapes his notice, and if he
has distinguished in general their natures as a result of previous continued study…and
if he is capable of determining in view of all these data, both scientifically and by
successful conjecture, the distinctive marks of qualities resulting from the combination
of all the factors, what is to prevent him from being able to tell on each given occasion
the characteristics of the air from the relations of the phenomena at that time? Why can
these relations not be extended to the characteristic, temperament, and life of human
beings?74
Yet in the opening pages of Tetrabiblos, Ptolemy makes one thing clear: although
astronomy and astrology remain closely related, the former science is superior to the latter.
Astronomy explains the cosmos. Astrology seeks to figure out exactly how the motions of the
74
Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, 11-13.
154
sun, moon, and planets will influence human beings on earth. The latter art constitutes an attempt
to practically apply the brilliance of the former discipline. But astrology depends upon
astronomy, while the opposite is not true. In a sense, the relationship between astronomy and
astrology mirrors the relationship between theoretical and practical medicine.
But if astrology represents an offshoot or branch of astronomy, the astrologer, at least in
early modern times, concerns himself with a wider variety of questions than the astronomer.
Although the astronomer explains a great deal, in a sense, his practice requires that he only
describe the motions of the heavenly bodies. The astrologer, on the other hand, must consider a
complex realm of things to predict how the celestial influences will affect the lives of men and
women on earth. Astronomy represents a rigorous science, combining syllogistic rationalism
with empirical observation in order to explain the web of natural influences linking nature and
the heavenly bodies to earth and mankind. Astrology, on the other hand, develops from the
knowledge generated by astronomy, rests more upon an empirical foundation in practice, and
seeks to comprehend the web of natural influences between the heavens and human beings for
the purposes of rendering predictions. Like some modern scientists, the Renaissance astrologer
believed that through a systematic program of empirical investigation and scientific conjecture,
he could render comprehensible the workings of the universe in its grandest and most minute
detail.
But the early modern professional astrologer may have considered a bit too much for the
Renaissance medical philosopher.
*
*
*
*
*
155
In the required text Isagoge by Joannitius, Baldini would learn, “Changes of the air come
about in five different ways; [the first two being] from the seasons, and from the rising and the
setting of the stars.”
There are four seasons; namely Spring, which is hot and moist; Summer,which is hot
and dry; Autumn, which is cold and dry; Winter, which is cold and moist. The nature of
the air is changed by the stars, for when the sun approaches a star or a star the sun, the
air becomes hotter. But when they separate, the coldness of the air is altered, either
increased or diminished.75
But two important points must be made about the relationship between learned astrology
and scholarly medicine in western history: a). in nature, scope, form, and complexity, the
‘astrology’ of the medical practitioner paled by comparison to the studies of the full-time
astrologer, and b). although still institutionalized, by the later Renaissance, the significance and
influence of astrology on scholarly medicine waned considerably. The most prominent ancient
medical writers, including both Hippocrates and Galen, relied upon the rising and setting of stars
to distinguish the seasons of the year and to reach basic conclusions about each season. Bonafide
astronomers and astrologers looked to the sun, moon and a variety of other celestial phenomena
for ideas about the physical world. Simply put, the “medical astrology” of the scholarly
physician was less complex than the weighty discourse of the full-time astrologer.
In the previous chapter, we saw how by the later fifteenth century and throughout the
sixteenth century, scores of Italian scholars dedicated themselves to discovering, translating, and
expounding upon the classics of Greek science. For the humanists, the Latin and Arabic
75
Joannitius, Isagoge, “The Beginning of the Treatise on the Non-Naturals,” 707.
156
translations of ancient texts, and the bad habits of the scholastics that studied them, rendered
contemporary learning inadequate. We have seen the controversies which emerged regarding the
qualifications most relevant for interpretation of ancient learning; the humanists, with their selfproclaimed expertise in textual commentary, the scholastics, with their institutionalized
educational philosophy and pedagogical methods, and the trained natural philosophers,
depending upon the specific area of study, with their command of the subject matter at hand, all
competed for scholarly authority. These controversies touched natural philosophy in general (that
is to say, all areas of inquiry regarding the physical world) and medicine in particular. These
controversies affected astronomy/astrology, as fields themselves, and influenced their overall
significance for natural philosophy and branches of such, like medicine.
Crucially, for my purposes, late-Renaissance medical philosophers rarely staked out
significant positions, nor fought major battles, nor aligned themselves with particular schools of
thought, based on their position regarding astrology. Late Renaissance controversies regarding
theories of knowledge, hermeneutics, interpretation, educational philosophy, and pedagogical
methods rarely gained expression in astrological debates among scholarly physicians. While
defining themselves and redefining their discipline, late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
medical doctors lost interest in astrology.
Sixteenth-century scholarly debate concerning the wisdom of Vesalius rarely considers
the place of astrology in anatomy. Supporters and detractors of Harvey’s theory of circulation
seldom cite the Tetrabiblios or Almagest to prove the superiority of their arguments. The
growing school of university-trained “empiricists,” who emphasized the significance of
observation, experience, and trial-and-error experimentation, rarely emphasized the significance
of astrology within medicine. The neo-scholarly “professors of secrets,” as we shall see in future
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chapters, with their practical guides to healing that generally shared many things with universitytrained physicians, often mentioned astrology, but only in superficial fashion that would leave
full-time astrologers cold.
In a sense, scholarly conceptions of health and sickness were cast in
astronomical/astrological terms. As this chapter has emphasized, the macrocosm/microcosm
association between man and the physical world resided at the heart of humoural philosophy. But
it is anachronistic to attribute that perception to the disciplines of astronomy or astrology. The
sacred relationship between man and the cosmos constituted the main idea of ancient, medieval
and early modern natural philosophy—humoural theory represented a subset or outgrowth of
such thought. Astronomy represented an attempt to explain a comparatively narrow aspect of
such things (the movement of heavenly bodies), and astrology constituted an art which hoped to
learn how to predict the influence of celestial phenomena. These areas of inquiry hardly
represented the essence of natural philosophy or scholarly medicine. Instead, the thoroughly
interrelated nature of all the disciplines within early modern natural philosophy explains the
close correlation among the various theaters of investigation. Each discipline or area of
investigation held the macrocosm/microcosm association as its central tenet.
Astronomy/astrology and medicine held this in common, but neither discipline represented the
key to understanding the other.
Indeed, when leafing through the pages of Joannitius’ Isagoge, Avicenna’s Canon,
Galen’s On the Humours, Hippocrates’ On Medicine, or any of a number of texts featured at the
University of Padua during the late Renaissance, one finds only a moderate amount of astrology.
As best we can tell, sections of these texts devoted to astrology were not emphasized in medical
studies during the late sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. To be sure, medical astrology, or the
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place of astrology within scholarly medicine, existed, but it paled by comparison to the complex
discourse of the full-time astrologer. This point shall emerge more clearly when we turn our
attention to therapeutics within scholarly medicine.
*
*
*
*
*
As explained in the section on human biology within humoural theory, pre-modern
physicians thought about the difference between sickness and health in terms of the core qualities
of hot, cold, moist, and dry. In his essay On the Causes of Disease, Galen outlined eight basic
diseases arising from improper relationships, or imbalance, among the core qualities. In other
words, sick bodies were too hot, excessively dry, overly moist, or too cold. Centuries later,
Giacomo Baldini would study textbooks with major sections entitled “Diseases Arising from
Heat,” “Disease Arising from Cold,” “Diseases Arising from Moisture,” and “Diseases Arising
from Dryness.”76 The opposition of these basic qualities, as explained above, explained physical
phenomena within humoural theory.
This style of theorization also yielded a fundamental therapeutic principle within
humoural theory: the idea that “opposites cure opposites.” Simply put, the scholarly humoural
physician generally believed “hot bodies” needed cooling, “dry bodies” needed moisture, and so
on. Roger French has suggested the theory ‘opposites cure opposites’ constituted “the
fundamental and unquestionable axiom at the root of the whole theory of [humoural]
complexion.”77 In 1565, Pietro d’Abano suggested the theory of opposites “needed no proof,
76
77
See Joannitius, Isagoge, “Of the Varieties of Sickness,” 711-714.
French, Medicine before Science, 109.
159
being logically and medically axiomatic.”78 Indeed, the idea has been called the “Law of
Hippocrates.”79
The “Law of Hippocrates” provided the basis for much therapeutic treatment within
humoural theory. In the Isagoge, students read that “if a defect in the skin be of a styptic nature,
use a softening remedy; if dry, a moist one; and so on.”80 Like the poster commonly found in
modern health clinics which suggests ‘the best cure for burns is cold water,’ such ideas were
intuitively plausible and commonsensical. Indeed, humoural physicians wrapped the cold in
blankets and placed them near fires, put the sweaty, teary eyed and clammy (‘moist’) in dry
places or left them to bake in the sun, directed the itchy, peeling and flaky (‘dry’) to the baths,
and the like. In fact, an entire range of medicaments and topical solutions thought to deliver heat,
cold, moisture, and dryness both on the exterior of the body and inside the shell of human skin
were routinely deployed by scholarly physicians.
Prescriptions of herbal concoctions generally proceeded from the same principles. The
‘qualities’ of crushed nutmeg, diced rosemary flower and boiled water flavored with bits of apple
could counter the suffering patient’s qualitative imbalance. Physicians and apothecaries, quite
naturally, had to know the qualities of the ingredients they deployed. Proper training in materia
medica brought knowledge of the synergistic effects believed to result from certain combinations
of materials. Dry folks swallowed concoctions believed to be ‘moist’ in quality, the damp
consumed ‘dry’ medicines while the feverish were chilled back to health.
Nevertheless, the theory ‘opposites cure opposites’ hardly explains the full range of
therapeutic techniques within humoural theory. In fact, the ‘law of Hippocrates’ may not even
78
D’Abano, Conciliator Controversiarum, quae inter Philosophos et Medicos Versantur, folio 6r. Also see French,
Medicine before Science, 110.
79
French, Medicine before Science, 109.
80
See Joannitius, Isagoge, “Of the Varieties of Sickness,” 715.
160
represent the most fundamental healing principle within humoural theory. The significance of
evacuation, purging, and elimination comes closer to capturing the essence of humoural
therapeutics. It is to a closer consideration of ‘evacuation’ and its significance within early
modern medicine that we shall now turn.
*
*
*
*
*
During the early modern period, “blood-letting,” or phlebotomy, represented a technique
common to healers from different social levels, with different educational backgrounds, and
different ‘professions’ within the art of medicine. Scholarly medical philosophers drew blood for
the sake of healing. So did lesser respected professional surgeons. Vernacular healers may have
drawn more blood than either group described above. This chapter examines phlebotomy among
university educated physicians.
Theories of blood-letting can be found in the Hippocratic and Galenic literature of
antiquity. Like most ancient scholarly medical works, this literature was translated, studied,
reconsidered, and subsequently developed by Arabic scholars such as Avicenna and Joannitius
during the Middle Ages. Rediscovered, or newly appreciated by Europeans during the first
centuries of the early modern period, ancient and medieval literature on phlebotomy, like the
topsoil of a fertile field, was turned over once more. Scholastic philosophers and humanist
grammarians simultaneously pulled the art in different directions while up-and-coming medical
theorists offered criticism. Throughout western history, two distinct levels of published texts
outlined theories and methods on scholarly phlebotomy: a) concise tracts and treatises dedicated
solely to bloodletting, and b) chapters on such, buried within larger tomes of medical philosophy.
161
The similarities outweighed the differences.
But one needed no phlebotomy tract or specific chapter on blood-letting to grasp the
significance of evacuation within humoural theory. For whether the ancient masters explicitly
discussed purgation or not, so much of Hippocratic/Galenic teaching can be interpreted to mean
that ‘sickness’ implied the build-up of unhealthy humours; undoing this unwanted accumulation
required drawing off bodily matter. ‘Blood,’ that great fluid of the body, which corresponded to
air in nature, would be the first thing taken from the sick patient.
Roy Porter points out that Galenic medicine’s suspicion regarding a variety of maladies,
such as fevers, apoplexy, and headaches, may all be attributed to the physical mishap of
“plethora,” which Porter defines as “the excessive build-up of blood.” According to Porter,
“venesection [blood-letting] represented the obvious corrective.”81 One might draw blood
directly from visibly infected areas, to purge the bad humours from a wound. Or, one could draw
blood more generally, in the hopes of draining off some of the broadly dispersed and widely
diffused unwanted material.
The sheer intuitive plausibility of blood-letting made the idea so popular. Sickness did
not dwell within the muscles, bones, organs or outer shell of the body; sickness resided within
the bodily fluids—such things became corrupted and transported badness throughout the
miniature universe that was man. Removing some of the corrupted fluid allowed the body
quicker recovery. With phlebotomy, the physician performed a basic, yet fundamentally effective
service. Indeed, drawing blood lowers blood pressure, inducing calmness and tranquility. Such
influence must have been noted and interpreted positively, when the moaning and groaning of
early modern sufferers mellowed with phlebotomy.
The modern doctrine of “shock therapy,” which consists of temporary suspension of
81
Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 189.
162
brain waves via electromagnetic injection, holds that following disruption, the body’s return to
its natural equilibrium will result in improved health. Indeed, the idea of a good ‘shake-up’ when
things were bad resided at the heart of many phlebotomists. Changing the quantity of internal
fluids alerted the body to the present imperfection; the subsequent swirl of liquid matter would
naturally improve things.
The modern treatment of hemachromatosis proves the ingenuity of humoural theory.
Hemachromatosis is a blood disease. Victims suffer excessive accumulation of iron within the
body. To this day, the American Medical Association recommends phlebotomy as treatment for
hemachromatosis.82 As iron-laden blood is drawn off, the body produces new blood as
replacement. The newly generated blood contains normal levels of iron. After a certain period of
time, for reasons not entirely understood, excessive amounts of iron accumulate again within
sufferers of hemachromatosis. Once again, the licensed physician draws blood, and relative order
is temporarily restored (most sufferers of this disorder have blood drawn monthly). No known
cure for hemachromatosis exists. But modern treatment is nothing new.
Hence, whether studying to be a surgeon or general practitioner, the aspiring medical
philosopher learned the theory behind phlebotomy and the skills of blood-letting. As Nancy
Siraisi and others have demonstrated, early modern students quickly learned the proper veins
from which to draw blood. Most physicians targeted the three major veins of the arm (named the
cephalic, median, and basilica).83 Ligatures were used to concentrate local blood pressure and
tourniquets were employed to stem excessive bleeding. “A bloodletter should possess several
lancets (phlebotomos) of steel, bright and clean, of different shapes, some of which should be
fine and some big, some short and some long,” declares a scholarly sixteenth-century tract.
82
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, “How is Hemachromatosis Treated?”,
http://www.digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/hemachromatosis/index.htm#treatment.
83
Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 140.
163
“When it is necessary to open a large vein and make a large incision, the physician uses a larger
lancet, and the smaller one in the contrary case,” explained the author.
The physician should hold the lancet with the thumb and index finger of his
right hand and boldly tap the vein beforehand to find the best place for
bleeding; and then, with these two fingers, insert the lancet in whatever vein
he wishes.84
Frequently bled patients sometimes bared their feet and legs for the phlebotomist. Siraisi
suggests that other veins might be opened for particular conditions, for example, “melancholy
might call for bleeding from a vein in the forehead.”85
Scholarly physicians were taught to avoid bleeding the elderly. Those recovering from
lengthy illnesses were usually not phlebotomized either. Pregnant women were thought to be
unsuited for this measure. Phlebotomists were taught to reject pale, thin patients and those with
tiny veins. Although the therapy enjoyed widespread support, scholarly texts encouraged
moderation. “A man who goes to the barber all the time will be destroyed by bloodletting,”
warned Lanfranc. “It is better for some to conserve their blood and evacuate the corrupt humors
84
The passage comes from a famous fourteenth-century medical treatise attributed to the medical philosopher
Lanfranc. Originally published in English and Latin, the work was translated into Italian in the early sixteenth
century. In Venice, the book was published in 1546. See Lanfranc, Practica Magistri Lanfranci de Mediolano quae
dicitur ars complete totius chirurgiae, in Ars Chirurgia Guidonis Cauliaci Medici, fols. 250-251. I have also
consulted McVaugh’s translation from the Old English version, published as Lanfrank’s “Science of Cirurgie,”
Early English Text Society, Original Ser., no. 102 (1894), pt. 1, 298-303. My copy of McVaugh’s work comes from
Harvard University’s “Medicine and Society in Medieval and Renaissance Europe,” a non-published volume within
the school’s History of Science Department.
84
Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, 42.
85
Ibid., 140.
164
by other means.”86
Milder forms of blood-letting existed for those unwilling to expose major veins.
“Cupping” represented a moderate form of evacuative therapy endorsed by university professors
and taught in medical schools. In this procedure, the doctor heated the insides of a glass “cup” in
the hopes of forming a partial vacuum. Once sufficiently heated, the physician attached the
instrument to part of the body as quickly and efficiently as possible. Suction from the partial
vacuum drew blood from the infected area. Physicians sometimes pricked small holes in the
targeted surface area before applying the cup. The idea was to directly draw the corrupt humours
out of the body via physical intervention.87
If we examine Galenic literature used during the Renaissance, we find many aspects of
our recent discussion explained through the concept of blood-letting. “We know that nature
controls the body and does everything to preserve life,” wrote Galen in On Black Bile. “We can
also observe the passages [bodily secretions] which act for the sake of evacuation of whatever is
useless in food and drink; yet I should again explain how the sediment in poor blood can be
removed.”
The blood which comes from letting is seen to be thicker and darker in
bodies with dry and hot constitutions; and similarly according to the
particular time of the year, the locality, the physical conditions, way of life
and diet. All diseases that stem from a bad temperament that is hot and dry,
such as remittent fevers, produce thick dark blood. Many patients cured of
86
The ideas and quotations in this paragraph come from McVaugh’s translation of Lanfranc, Tract 3, Doctrine 3,
chap. 16, 300-301.
87
See Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 217-218. See also Pitré, Medici, chirurgic,
barbieri e speziali antichi.
165
such suffering experienced evacuation through the stomach…88
But if no such ‘evacuation through the stomach’ occurred naturally, the phlebotomist
might be called upon to open a vein. Yet, readers should take note of the phrase regarding the
“particular time of year” in the passage cited above. Textbooks and manuals on phlebotomy, as
well as many major works of medical philosophy, also provided recommendations regarding
appropriate seasons of the year, phases of the moon, and times of day for effective blood-letting.
The astrological component of phlebotomy provoked controversy during the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth century.
At times, Galen seemed to take the astrological aspects of blood-letting fairly seriously.
In some texts, he stressed the significance of time and place to proper phlebotomy.89 But the
influence of astrology on phlebotomy within official Renaissance medicine must be qualified.
For one thing, as touched upon above, the Renaissance phlebotomist operated from a view of the
stars that would have been unacceptable to a bonafide astronomer/astrologer. Early modern
blood-letters relied upon the rising and setting of the stars to determine the judicious time for
puncturing veins. For the classical astrologer, every heavenly body possessed its own color,
qualities, correspondences—indeed, yet another perplexing taxonomic grid that might yield
many different suggestions regarding the most advantageous time to draw blood from a certain
individual. Incorporating astrology into phlebotomy necessitated simplifying the former.
We may also reasonably conclude that many professional physicians separated highly
intellectualized theory from pragmatic practice when drawing blood. The frequency of early
modern blood-letting suggests a practice unrestrained by fastidious reference to classical
88
89
Galen, On Black Bile, cited in Grant, Galen on Food and Diet, 23.
See Brain, Galen on Bloodletting.
166
astrology. In the Venetian version of Lanfranc’s treatise on bloodletting, published in 1546, and
circulated throughout early modern European medical schools, the author admits:
Phlebotomy is called elective, since we can choose time and hour, climate, or
disposition of the patient, considering many particulars and waiting for the
ideal time and moment. Although we consider many particulars when need
be, nevertheless sometimes, we insist on nothing except the strength of the
patient’s forces. Actually, necessity may sometimes compel us to bleed him
when his forces are weak, but then we do in three or four successive
operations what could be done with stronger patients in one.90
Even, Anthony Grafton suggests, educated Renaissance physicians understood the
astrologically determined propitious time for treatment, “at least in theory.”91 One suspects many
early modern patients hoped for the improvement associated with blood-letting, regardless of the
near infinite possibilities raised by consulting the twelve houses of the Zodiac. Joannitius’s
Isagoge and Avicenna’s Canon allude to astrology, without opening the doors to an expansive
influence on healing.
Whether presented in flowery language, shrouded in complex logic, or enacted with dull
knives, phlebotomy represented a fundamental part of scholarly medicine. The reason, as
described at the outset of this section, concerns phlebotomy’s place within the larger concept of
evacuation. Two of the authoritative voices cited above emphasize this relationship. Lanfranc,
the reader will recall, suggests, “it is better for some to conserve their blood and evacuate corrupt
90
Lanfranc, Practica Magistri Lanfranci de Mediolano quae dicitur ars complete totius chirurgiae, 250-251. See
also McVaugh, trans., Lanfrank’s “Science of Cirurgie,” pt. 1, 298-303.
91
Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, 42.
167
humours by other means,” while Galen explained that “many patients cured of suffering [via
phlebotomy] experienced evacuation through the stomach.” Martin Luther’s efforts to purge the
social body of its corrupt influences resonated with meaning, coincidental or otherwise, within
sixteenth century medical schools.92
Indeed, one finds references to evacuation throughout Hippocratic, Galenic, and
humoural medical literature. Nancy Siraisi suggests that when facilitating or inducing evacuatio,
the medieval and early modern medical practitioner thought himself to be “imitating nature.”93
Purging, as a therapeutic technique, would almost seem as basic to humoural theory as the four
elements and their qualities. Consider Hippocrates’ recommendations regarding the treatment of
gangrene in a text revered throughout late Renaissance medical schools:
The Mortification of Gangrene: If the gangrene mortifies the sick limb loses
sensation, a feeling of cold comes to the head and the affected limb sweats. He
suddenly loses his speech and blows blood from his nose as he becomes pale.
One must induce sneezing by pleasant substances; one evacuates by the upper
and the lower.94
Many modern historians of Renaissance medicine seem to associate purgation, or the
forced expulsion of corrupted influences from the sick body, with neo-scholarly and vernacular
92
Several scholars, in fact, have made this point regarding the phenomena of “purging” or “cleansing,” which one
encounters in much sixteenth-century thought, and the strong emphasis on evacuation in late Renaissance healing.
Even the Venetian Inquisition, which contains much valuable information about vernacular healing in the late
sixteenth century, sought to cleanse popular culture of its heretical practices. For the best treatments on the
relationship between social cleansing and evacuation within medicine, see Camporesi, La carne impassibile, and
Eamon, “With the Rules of Life and an Enema,” 29-44. See also Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature,
especially the section entitled “The Politics of Purgation,” 187-193.
93
Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti, 252.
94
Hippocrates, Epidemics III, bk. 7, cited from Smith, The Hippocratic Tradition, 123.
168
healing, rather than university-based teaching. Most scholarly texts do, in fact, rationalize and
justify evacuation with the logic of restoring humoural balance and harmony, rather than
physically eliminating the causes and manifestations of illness. Nevertheless, the widespread
discussion of evacuation within scholarly texts implies that learned medical philosophers viewed
disease as a very real ontological entity, or foreign presence within the body, that healers needed
to eliminate, even if germ theory and ideas regarding bacteria had yet to be explicitly articulated.
Much speculation existed within humoural medicine during the late Renaissance. For all
the emphasis placed upon memorization and rote learning among students, established scholars
engaged in research, writing, and discursive development. As medical philosophers, scholarly
physicians seemed better suited to raise questions than isolate facts or render irrefutable truths.
As a philosophical system, humoural medicine offered propositions by which to seek
explanations of broad, wide, and profound questions. The science of medicine, characterized by
trial-and-error experimentation designed to precisely determine highly specified ideas on very
particular subjects, remained in the future. Consequently, the technical side of humoural
medicine pales by comparison to the grandiose metaphors, analogies and larger ideas within the
theoretical branch of the art.
Nevertheless, Giacomo Baldini and his classmates would be responsible for the ideas
regarding temperments, complexion, humours, spirits and energy described above. Aspiring
physicians would reconsider the four elements and the four qualities within the context of
questions regarding the body, health, sickness and healing. How these ideas compared with the
beliefs and practices of other healers in early modern society shall be a question considered in
subsequent chapters.
169
Chapter Three
The Secrets of a Sixteenth-Century Venetian Woman:
Isabella Cortese and Alchemical Medicine
In the summer of 1584, the public squares and large piazzas of Venice bustled with a
level of commercial activity and social interaction few early modern European cities could
match. Blessed with unusually pleasant weather, spacious San Marco’s Square provided the
perfect setting for the countless peddlers, vendors, performers, entertainers, visitors, and natives
that routinely mixed there. In a sense, the dynamic vibrancy of the annual “season of festivities”
threatened to undermine the city’s self-proclaimed title of La Serenissima, or the “Most Serene
Republic.” But for the historian, the complex social interactions of those hot, muggy, yet clear
days of summer left a trail of documentary evidence worthy of close inspection. Then and now,
every Venetian summer produces an important window through which to view a different
glimpse of the city, long after the parties and celebrations fade away.
According to the Augustinian monk and social critic Tommaso Garzoni (1549-1589), one
distinguishing characteristic of the summer of 1584 concerned the arrival of a new group of
curious people. In 1585, Garzoni published an encyclopedic survey of all the professions, trades
and various activities he judged to constitute the social world of sixteenth-century Italy. Among
the 517 “professions” he discussed in Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, the
“professors of secrets” (I professori de’ secreti) demanded a conspicuous amount of this
observant Augustinian’s attention.1 Who were these strange people who commanded close to six
pages of text in Garzoni’s survey? Since many of them had published books, an accomplishment
the well published Garzoni considered worthy, he labeled them “professors.” But unlike
1
Garzoni, La Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo.
170
seasoned scholars from clerical backgrounds, who pursued important questions with measured
reasoning, these professori de’ secreti seemed to defy the boundaries of properly ordered
intellectual discourse. The contents of their books—recipes, formulas, and itemized solutions to
common problems—ranged far and wide, lacking any unifying set of organizational principles or
basis in Christian logic. Garzoni wondered publicly about those “who attend to the pursuit of
secrets so passionately, that they yearn for it more than for the necessities of life itself.” What
was it about “secrets” that aroused Garzoni’s suspicion?
“Secrets,” wrote Garzoni, in a rather long-winded explanation, “are things whose reasons
are not very clear that they might be understood by everyone, but by their very nature are
manifested only to a very few; nevertheless, they contain certain seeds of discovery, which
facilitate finding out the road to discovering whatever the intellect may desire to know.”2 But
there seemed to be no limit to the things the professors of secrets wanted to know. According to
Garzoni, they concerned themselves with “the virtues of rocks and plants, the scienza of
separating metals and distillation, the production of colors and the investigation of all sorts of
various, different things.” Garzoni observed that some of these writers “considered occult
questions that only God could know, like the nature of the heavens, while others concerned
themselves only with utility and practical application.”3 Some of these books, charged Garzoni,
contained “ridiculous, vain secrets, under the name of Hermetica, promising ways to render
one’s face invisible, or methods enabling one to see the crystal heavens, or stories of diabolical
characters that can develop the evil eye.” Pursuing secrets could be an honorable endeavor,
Garzoni admitted, so long as one dedicated himself to the pursuit of “good secrets.”
Unfortunately, according to Garzoni, these writers often pursued “the ridiculous secrets,” of
2
3
Ibid., fol. 80v.
Ibid., fol. 80v.
171
magic and deception, often producing “more smoke than victuals.”4
But nothing could disguise, camouflage, or deflect attention from one of Garzoni’s main
concerns regarding these books: several texts concerned medicine and healing, and the
Augustinian monk doubted their legitimacy. Garzoni never questioned the wisdom of consulting
a properly trained physician like Girolamo Cardano, whom he praised for his well ordered,
clearly written medical tracts that paid proper respect to the ancients. But Garzoni warned of
authors who did not sufficiently consider the dignified medical writers of the past such as Plinio,
Serapion, Theophrastus, Galen, Dioscorides, and Avicenna. If one took an interest in herbs, one
ought to study the “great work of Dioscorides, the most famous in this discipline.” Garzoni urged
readers to consult the work of Andrea Cesalpino Aretino, the “illustrious medical man that has
written sixteen erudite books on modern medicinal plants and herbs,” but he viciously rejected
the “pack of lies and nonsense…above all, the deception of these ‘alchemists’ and ‘distillers,’
that promise to make diamonds and always find the remedy to every type of impediment.”5
Indeed, there would be nothing secretive about Garzoni’s contempt for these authors and their
customers.
But who were these “professors of secrets”? How can one broadly describe their
backgrounds? How can we understand their teachings within the context of early modern natural
philosophy? From what theories of knowledge or intellectual traditions did their teachings
originate? This paper shall explore these questions through an inspection of one relatively
obscure professor of secrets named Isabella Cortese. Through a close reading of Cortese’s only
known publication, I secreti (Venice, 1561), I shall attempt to explain the metaphysical,
epistemological, and ontological foundations of a female Renaissance natural philosopher whose
4
5
Ibid.
Ibid., fol. 83v.
172
teachings closely paralleled those of her more famous male counterparts. While Tommaso
Garzoni mentioned professional writers with longstanding interests in natural philosophy like
Girolamo Ruscelli (alias Alessio Piemontese, 1500-1566), and wealthy noblemen like
Giambattista Della Porta (1535-1615), who formed institutions dedicated to the pursuit of
philosophical questions, and former university students who never quite obtained legitimate
medical degrees, but wrote extensively on health and healing like Leonardo Fioravanti (15181588) and Giovanni Zapata (1520-1586), he did not have much to say about a relatively unkown
Venetian woman excluded from the circles of formal education. But Isabella Cortese almost
certainly consulted the teachings of all these men and may well have studied the intellectual
ancestors of this group, men like Paracelsus, Arnaud of Vilanova, and Raimond Lull, as intently
as any of the “professors of secrets” lambasted by Garzoni.
*
*
*
*
*
Published in 1561 and dedicated to Mario Chaboga, Archdeacon of the Kingdom of
Ragusa, The Secrets of Signora Isabella Cortese, Which Contains Secrets of Minerals,
Medicines, Artifices, and Alchemy, and Much on the Art of Perfumery, For Every Great Lady,
may be described as a problem-solving manual of recipes, formulas and solutions regarding a
wide range of questions, issues and challenges facing early modern Europeans from all different
walks of life. I secreti, as I shall call the volume, offers advice on everything from the production
of fragrance, cosmetics, and jewelry to the maintenance of healthy skin, hair, and teeth. Readers
will find treatments for scabies, ringworm, and fevers, cures of gout, dropsy and nausea. The
book describes ointments for wounds, care for plague victims, and treatments for men suffering
173
sexual dysfunction. I secreti reads like a physician’s cookbook of remedies, in which the
ingredients and instructions are listed in clear and concise order. The book need not be read in
linear fashion; a highly itemized table of contents directs the reader to specific recipes tailored to
resolve specific problems. The volume consists of mechanical instructions that any literate
person could conceivably follow, provided that he or she was familiar with the basic instruments,
materials, and procedures of the alchemist and empowered with a resourceful nature regarding
the acquisition of ingredients.
*
*
*
*
*
The technical side of Cortese’s work involved, among other things, refining liquids,
distilling oils, and extracting “essences” from compounds and mixtures. Cortese also pulverized
solids and mixed them together to form new substances, dissolving, melting, freezing, forging,
and putrefying at dizzying rates of repetition, urging users to “repeat the steps described above,”
three, four, or five times for greater benefit. The book utilizes virtually every chemical and herb
known to sixteenth-century Europe, ranging from antimony to zerpillo, with conspicuous
consumption of sulphur, mercury, and the compounds saltpeter and vitriol. Natural ingredients as
far-reaching as quail’s testicles, goat’s milk, dragon’s blood, large winged ants, oriental amber,
sour oranges, and horse manure also make their way to the pages of this volume.
Those parts of Cortese’s book that deal with metallurgy for household use, such as the
production of cosmetics, dyes, fragrances, stain removers, or jewelry construction, take on a
particular tone and orientation. Unlike her medical recipes, these texts tend to be concisely
articulated, with little or no justification for the directions offered. Like thousands of Venetian
174
artisans that burned glass, shaped ceramic pottery, hammered metals, and boiled dyes with no
real sense of any deep metaphysical meaning underlining their work, Cortese proceeds in
non-philosophical fashion in these areas.
Let us consider, for example, a brief comparison between an alchemical recipe for
“mosaic gold” offered by a late fourteenth-century Florentine craftsman and the work of Isabella
Cortese. In 1390, Cennini Cennino, a goldsmith and alchemist completely outside the medical
profession, offered the following set of instructions for producing gold:
Take sal ammoniac, tin, sulphur, quicksilver, in equal parts; except less of the
quicksilver. Put these ingredients into a flask of iron, copper or glass. Melt it all on the
fire. Let it rest and it shall be done.6
Approximately 170 years later, all the elements and chemicals used by Cennini can be
found in Cortese’s volume. Cortese’s language, orientation, and tone resemble Cennini in the
area of basic metallurgical work. Consider the following recipe for making blue dye in Isabella
Cortese’s I secreti:
Take sal ammoniac, sulphur, dissolve it in water, approximately two fingers worth in
measurement, put one libre of roman vitriol and one libre of living silver in, put these
ingredients in a strong glass flask and heat them all together. After melting, let them sit
for one or two nights and all will be perfect.7
“Sal ammoniac,” which one sees throughout the pages of I secreti, represented a potent
6
7
Quoted from Cennini’s The Craftsman’s Handbook, 102.
Cortese, I secreti, “A far azurro,” bk. 3, cap. 52, fol. 90.
175
solvent for dissolving metals. According to Pietro Matthioli, a physician hired by the Venetian
Republic in 1540 to catalogue the history of medicine herbs compiled by the ancient doctor
Dioscorides, the use of sal ammoniac dates back to antiquity.8 Cortese considered sulphur and
mercury, as shall be explained in greater detail below, to be the two primary components of all
metals. It is safe to assume Cennini shared this belief. The primacy of sulphur and mercury in
metallurgical inquiry dominated alchemical writing from the thirteenth to the seventeenthcentury.9 Cortese interpreted “quicksilver,” the term used by Cennini, to represent a purified
form of silver “formed by white sulphur as influenced by the moon.” According to Cortese,
imbued with the special virtues of sulphur, quicksilver represented “living silver.”
But the sloppy, imprecise language used by Cennini—“use equal parts, except less of the
quicksilver”—typifies Cortese’s style when discussing metallurgy for household use. Both
authors insist on the use of iron, copper, or glass flasks, and the concise, succinct language of the
conclusion implies simplicity for the sake of inspiring confidence. Simply put, the language and
ideas of a non-medical alchemist in 1390 could have constituted a recipe in Cortese’s I secreti
almost two centuries later.10
The purely medicinal recipes contained in Isabella Cortese’s I secreti, however, possess a
distinct sixteenth-century flavor. In the pages that follow, I shall argue that Cortese’s approach to
8
Matthioli, I Discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli.
See Debus, The Chemical Philosophy, and Holmyard, Alchemy (orginally printed in 1957), as well as Smith, The
Body of the Artisan. During Cortese’s lifetime, Paracelsus added a third “basic principle” to the mix—salt—
suggesting that salt, sulphur, and mercury represented the three basic elements of all metals and, in a sense, of the
earth and all living things.
10
Furthermore, a wave of alchemical manuscripts and books similar to Cennini’s Il Libro dell’Arte were published
during the early sixteenth century. These publications probably exerted some influence on Cortese’s approach to
basic metallurgy. The best known source for listings of early modern alchemical publications is still Thorndike’s
“Alchemy During the First Half of the 16th Century,” especially 26-37. Hirsch’s “The Invention of Printing and the
Diffusion of Alchemical Knowledge” provides a more detailed list with dates and the cities of publication. Most
recently, Dixon’s “Bosch’s Garden of Delights Triptych” includes an appendix of alchemical and pharmaceutical
books printed between 1460-1515 (see 113). Dixon cites dozens of works whose primary subjects are not alchemy
but which discuss the art and presuppose knowledge of its basic precepts. Dixon also lists thirty-two publications
specifically on alchemy published between 1460-1515. Most of the works listed had several editions. Clearly,
alchemical publications experienced a renaissance during the early years of Isabella Cortese’s life.
9
176
health and healing reflect the influence of what Carlos Gilly and Cis van Heertum call a
“Paracelsian/Hermetic revival,” which they suggest began in the 1550s.11 This revival may be
broadly described as a combination of artisanal convictions, certain strands of alchemical
philosophy, theory and practice, cloaked in a rather particular set of Christian beliefs.12
Isabella Cortese never elaborates a coherent, systematic medical ideology in the pages of
I secreti. Cortese never explicitly lays out a working theory of the body, health, sickness, and
healing.13 Many of her medicinal recipes would seem to be informed by folkloric perceptions of
health, or vernacular healing practices among non-learned people outside university. For these
reasons, I secreti does not belong in a literary genre of learned alchemical medical philosophy.
Nevertheless, strong parallels exist between Cortese’s medicinal remedies and the
sixteenth-century alchemical medical philosophy most closely associated with Paracelsus. In
fact, Isabella Cortese’s perception of nature, the body, health, and healing would seem to be
influenced by certain strands of thought within what might be called a larger “western alchemical
tradition”—a body of related ideas and sets of practices which took shape in the late medieval
period and arguably served as the precursor of modern medical chemistry. It is to a brief
historical discussion of western alchemical medical philosophy and its relationship to Isabella
Cortese’s I secreti that I shall now turn.
11
Gilly and van Heertum, eds., Magia, Alchimia, Scienza Dal ‘400 al ‘700, 10-11.
For discussions of Paracelsian alchemical medicine and Paracelsian/Hermetic philosophy, see Smith, The Body of
the Artisan, especially chap. 5, “The Legacy of Paracelsus, Practitioners and New Philosophers.” See also Webster,
“Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine,” in Health, Medicine and Mortality, 301-333; Webster, “Paracelsus and
Demons: Science as a Synthesis of Popular Belief,” 3-20; Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical
Medicine; Ferrari, “Alcune vie di diffusione in Italia di idee e di testi di Paracelso,” 21-29; and Galluzzi, “Motivi
Paracelsiani nella Toscana di Cosimo II e di Don Antonio dei Medici: Alchimia, Medicina ‘Chimica’ e riforma del
sapere,” 31-67. In addition, see Debus, “Paracelsianism and the Diffusion of the Chemical Philosophy,” 225-245,
and Moran, “Medicine, Alchemy and the Control of Language,” 135-150, both in Grell’s Paracelsus: The Man and
His Reputation.
13
I secreti contains no preface or introduction. One must glean ideas about the theoretical underpinnings of
Cortese’s work via critical readings of her dedicatory remarks and two conspicuously elaborate headings directed to
her brother-in-law, Mario Chaboga, contained in the book.
12
177
*
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*
In the history of medicine, the term “iatrochemistry” has emerged as an umbrella concept
and a loose generalization to describe a complex group of medico-chemical ideologies extending
from medieval times down through the late Renaissance. Broadly speaking, “medical chemistry”
may be said to have begun with the utilization of chemical processes in the preparation of
medicines. The idea that disease and illness may be cured with treatments of chemical
concoctions, or that physicians might harness the natural healing properties of certain elements
or plants via chemical manipulation, erupted in Europe during the sixteenth-century. The origins
of these movements seem to have been deeply rooted in alchemy.
In 1934, A.J. Hopkins complained that scholars lacked a “comprehensive explanation,”
or unifying theory, that would “coordinate the whole and make clear to the modern mind the
purpose and underlying conception of the alchemist.”14 Over seventy years later, this problem
still exists. But contemporary historians of natural philosophy no longer search for a unitary
theory of alchemy. Instead, scholars are more likely to view alchemy as a catchword describing
multiple sets of practices, beliefs, and ideologies all stemming from one general principle: the
idea that inferior things, such as ordinary metals, could be converted into specimens of a higher
quality, such as gold, via physical manipulation and chemical treatment. Historically, much
alchemical philosophy, theory, and practice has centered around the quest for the proper
medicine of transmutation. This special ingredient is sometimes called the “elixir,” or the
“quintessence,” or even the “fifth element.”
As thirteenth-century Friar Roger Bacon wrote in The Mirror of Alchemy, which was first
printed in Nuremberg and Paris a few short years prior to Cortese’s book:
14
Hopkins, Alchemy: Child of Greek Philosophy, 3-4.
178
In many ancient Bookes there are found many definitions of this Art. For Hermes saith
of this Science: Alchimy is a Corporal Science…naturally conjoining things more
precious, by knowledge and effect, and converting them by a naturall commixtion into
a better kind. A certain other saith: Alchimy is a Science, teaching how to transforme
any kind of mettall into another; and that by a proper medicine as it appeareth by many
Philosophers Bookes. Alchimy therefore is a science teaching how to make and
compound a certain medicine, which is called Elixir, the which when it is cast upon
mettalls or imperfect bodies, doth fully perfect them in a verie projection.15
Almost three centuries later, another Bacon—Francis—described the “true sciences” as
astrology, alchemy, and physiognomy. According to Francis Bacon, these sciences were
characterized by “art assisting nature (per artem juvantem naturae)” and “art using nature for an
instrument (ars utens natura pro instrumento).” Bacon held that art has the power to “change,
transmute, or fundamentally alter nature.”16 Francis Bacon, as we shall see in Chapter 4,
speculated on a wide variety of issues and his work provoked much debate. But a sixteenthcentury reader could readily interpret Bacon as suggesting that the legitimate technician of the
physical world facilitated natural processes and expedited natural phenomena through learned
methods to achieve desired ends. These ideas, as we shall see below, were echoed by Isabella
Cortese in her dedication to I secreti. But the art of alchemy itself experienced significant
15
Bachon, The Mirror of Alchimy Composed by the Thrice-Famous and Learned Fryer, Roger Bachon, 3. This
treatise originally consisted of a series of manuscript tracts collected together during Bacon’s lifetime. They were
first actually printed in Europe in Nuremberg in 1541 as De Alchemia in the Latin language. A French edition
appeared in 1557 and an English version in 1597.
16
In Book 2 of De Augmentis, in The Works of Francis Bacon, 4:295. Cited here from Linden, The Alchemy Reader,
13.
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transformation from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century.
In fact, in the years following Roger Bacon’s death, alchemy fell on hard times in
Europe. In 1317 Pope John XXII issued the bull Spondent pariter, which forbade alchemy and
villified alchemists. “To such an extent,” wrote the pope, “does their damned temerity go that
they stamp upon the base metal the characters of public money for believing eyes, and it is only
in this way that they deceive the ignorant populace as to the alchemical fire of the furnace.”17
Ten years later, the Italian alchemist Cecco d’Ascoli was burned at the stake by the inquisition in
Florence.18
Closer to Cortese’s time, the fifteenth-century Paduan Francesco Filefo wrote, “Those
who think that, by spoiling and corrupting copper, silver or gold can be made, seem to me stupid
fools. But triflers of that type devise certain names of herbs and other such things, known to
themselves alone which produce nothing but wild fancies and frauds.”19 The Venetian Republic
formally banned alchemy and outlawed alchemical equipment in 1488. But the fires still burned,
both literally and figuratively in the hearts, minds, and laboratories of natural philosophers and
craftsmen in Venice and beyond.
In the Venetian Republic, legal restrictions directed against alchemists referred mainly to
those practitioners thought to pose threats to copper and gold currency. The laws were meant to
limit potential counterfeiters, not pharmacists, apothecaries, and physicians who generally
violated no specific law with the concoction of a medical potion. Furthermore, a good bit of
evidence exists to suggest the laws limiting alchemy were routinely ignored. In spite of legal
prohibitions, alchemical texts were published throughout the sixteenth century. Isabella Cortese’s
“I secreti” represents an example of such a publication.
17
Quoted from Holmyard, Alchemy, 149.
Ball, The Devil’s Doctor, 74.
19
Quoted from Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 4, 395.
18
180
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In the three hundred years prior to the publication of Isabella Cortese’s I secreti, a series
of closely related cosmological views, or perceptions of nature, along with sets of corresponding
alchemical philosophies of medicine, derived from such views, took shape. Most directly
influenced by Arnaud of Villanova, Raymond Lull, John of Rupescissa, and Paracelsus, these
alchemical medical philosophies shared the following precepts: a) “distillation,” or the separation
of volatile components of a substance by heating and condensing, could be applied to the
preparation of medical drugs, b) by means of various methods of distillation, special properties
conceived as “essences” or “virtues” could be extracted from herbs, minerals, chemicals and
metals to help form healing solutions, and c) these chemically prepared solutions could be
targeted at specific medical conditions, such as wounds or diseases, in order to provide
immediate relief. Rather than the broad, imprecise remedies of Galenic medicine designed to
restore “humoral balance” or comprehensive “regimens of health,” which required long term
alterations in lifestyle for effectiveness, these custom designed chemical concoctions were
constructed for direct application to specific medical needs.
Before providing a concise historical evolution of these closely related alchemical
medical philosophies, it may be helpful to build on the points outlined above. In a series of
essays written in the 1530s, Paracelsus argued that rather than striving to cure illness via
“readjustments of humoral balance,” which he rejected as fundamentally misguided, doctors
ought to harness the natural “virtues” implicit in many things within the physical world and
181
produce chemical remedies.20 The liberation of “virtues,” according to Paracelsus, may be
achieved by a skillful process of separation—a parting of the excess and waste of mundane
reality from the vital, living spirit of a given material. Such separation, which necessitated
alchemical processes, could unleash healing forces of nature, “which are too wonderful to ever
be thoroughly investigated.”21
The Paracelsian alchemical processes of distillation, sublimation, calcination, and
putrefaction, all to be briefly discussed below, also form the basis of Isabella Cortese’s
alchemical medicine. According to Paracelsus, as distillation extracted oils from plants, guided
and protracted forms of distillation could liberate ingredients from other objects as well. Even
metals could be distilled for the purpose of yielding healing agents. The Paracelsian text
Archidoxa describes many categories of chemical remedies and their means of preparation from
herbs, leaves, earth, minerals, metals, and other compounds. In this text, Paracelsus defines a
“quintessence” as “a nature, a force, a virtue, and a medicine, once, indeed shut up within things,
but now free from any domicile and from all outward incorporation…it is a spirit like the spirit
of life, but with this difference, that the life-spirit of a thing is permanent, but that of man is
mortal.”22
Devising medicinal drugs would require searching for special healing agents buried
within the elements of the physical world. As Paracelsus wrote:
What the eyes perceive in herbs or stones or trees is not yet a remedy; the eyes see only
dross, there the remedy lies hidden. First it must be cleansed from the dross, then it is
20
See Webster, “Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine,” in Health, Medicine and Mortality, 301-333.
Quoted from Waite, The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Phillipus Theophrastus Bombast, vol. 2,
3. Waite translates “The Coelum Philosophorm,” or “Book of Vexations,” regarding “The Science and Nature of
Alchemy.”
22
Ibid., 22.
21
182
there. This is alchemy, and this is the office of Vulcan; he is the apothecary and the
chemist of medicine.23
For Paracelsus, the “apothecary and chemist of medicine” lived in a universe packed with
healing agents. The physical world represented a giant pharmacy waiting for discovery. As the
causes of disease sprang from the physical world, so too must the remedies for illness reside
within nature. The doctrine of signs, or “signature medicine,” held that nature, or God, marked
the various elements of the physical world in ways that implied their healing potential. For
example, heart-shaped plants might be used to prepare medicines for the heart. In speaking of the
Satyrion root, Paracelsus suggested that it “looked like the male privy parts,” and concluded that
it “can restore a man’s virility and passion.” The good doctor added that the thistle plant had
“leaves that prick like needles” and concluded “there is no better remedy against internal
stitches.”24 The physical world constituted a limitless warehouse of healing materials.25
But Paracelsus’s chemical philosophy held the key to more than just an understanding of
nature’s potential healing properties. Paracelsian alchemical philosophy explained man as well,
for man and nature could only be properly understood in relation to one another. Paracelsus
thoroughly subscribed to the ancient macrocosm-microcosm theory; the idea that the physical
and spiritual processes that occurred in living bodies (microcosms) represented reflections of
those in the cosmos (macrocosm) and vice-versa. The dictum “as above, so below,” so often
attributed to Paracelsus, actually appeared in western civilization from ancient times and traveled
23
Jacobi, ed., Paracelsus: Selected Writings, 93-94.
Quoted from Weeks, Paracelsus: Speculative Theory, 121.
25
Such thinking enjoyed great currency in early modern Europe. As explained in the previous chapter and worth
repeating here, prior to the late nineteenth century, many people viewed health, sickness, and healing through an
interpretive lens that could be most closely associated with “natural healing” today. For more on this subject see
Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance, especially chap. 3, “The Study of Nature in a Changing World,” and
chap. 8, “Epilogue and Indecision.”
24
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through the medieval period down to the Renaissance. This represented one of the few ancient
ideas the controversial alchemical philosopher did not reject. For Paracelsus, God created man in
His own image, but He also created the world in His own image and imparted the image of the
world into man and vice-versa. In Eleven Treatises, written around 1520, Paracelsus suggests,
“The one who put the winds and seas, sun, moon and all in the heavens, he put it all in the human
being as well….For what is the entire world but a sign that is of God and has been made by
God?”26
*
*
*
*
*
If we stop for a moment to consider some of the reflections offered by Isabella Cortese in
the passages written to Mario Chaboga within I secreti, we find strong elements of Paracelsian
thought. In broaching the subject of healing, Cortese emphasized the relationship between man
and nature. For her first example of a healing agent, Cortese chose to speak about the element
“camphor” (canfora). Camphor is a white, crystalline substance generally obtained from the bark
of laurel trees, which can render oil when distilled. According to Cortese:
For man and nature are united, they are composed not of three different things, but of
the same three things. Therefore, I want you to understand this holy land not in the way
that the philosophers have taught, or perhaps in a way that they do not understand.
There may be times, for example, when we must ask of the land for the simple spirit of
Camphor, which is sold quite commonly among the vulgar. But not just any Camphor
will work, for cold Camphor can freeze in the body and will be of no value to the soul
26
Weeks, Paracelsus: Speculative Theory, 121.
184
or the spirit. While congelation may proceed from cold Camphor, the solution we seek
proceeds only from warm Camphor. To know this is to know that there are great secrets
in nature. Because within Camphor resides a great spirit, if it be prepared properly. But
if it be burned it may be a little more than sulphur, as the philosophers or the vulgar
might call it. For we have need of a method to prepare camphor properly.27
In her long tedious recipe for the preparation of proper camphor, Cortese suggests using
the “water of life,” a specially distilled liquid discussed by Dioscorides in ancient times.28 The
preparation process includes periodic testing for sweet taste, a technique emphasized by John of
Rupescissa over one hundred and fifty years earlier.29 If done properly, “the spirits of the water
of life shall enter the camphor and fix it properly,” assures Cortese. Like Paracelsus, Cortese
believed a certain spirit or virtue resided within camphor. Proper chemical distillation could
conceivably liberate that spirit and instill its special properties into another material.
For Cortese, God and nature provide all the healing ingredients man could desire in the
physical world in which he resides. “For within the land of God’s great earth and within the
movement of the skies He created, is produced all of the fruits and all of the spirits that the soul
of man must have, and so says Hermes quite definitively,” writes Cortese, adding that “the land
is nourished with the water of life, and if the great Philosophers know this, they are unable to
reveal it without dark words or terrible fear.”30 Echoing the ideas of Francis Bacon regarding the
necessity of “art assisting nature” or “art using nature as an instrument,” Cortese writes:
27
Cortese, I secreti, bk. 2, chap. 1, fol. 33-34.
According to Robert P. Multhauf, Arnaud of Villanova, John of Rupescissa, and thirteenth-century medical
philosopher and teacher Taddeo Alderotti debated the idea of “acqua vitae” as a fifth element to add to Aristotle’s
four elements of nature. See Multhauf, “John of Rupescissa and the Origin of Medical Chemistry,” 364.
29
See Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 3, 360.
30
Cortese, I Secreti, bk. 2, chap. 1, fol. 33.
28
185
However, there may be times when it seems like nature does not produce a certain
element that we need, at least not in any way that is self-evident and simple to realize,
and so the body and soul of man may be unable to receive a certain spirit that is needed.
During these times, the body is like barren land prior to the infusion of the spirit and the
soul that are nature. There may be times when we must ask of the land for simple
spirits.
But like Paracelsus, Cortese’s alchemical philosophy seems to explain more than just
man’s metaphorical relationship to nature or the proper guide to discovering effective medicines.
Instead, for Cortese, alchemical philosophy would seem to explain the mysteries of origin and
existence. Returning to her letter to Mario Chaboga we read:
Now then, we know in the beginning it was our glorious God who made the first body
and in that first body, which came to be Adam, was infused a spirit and then a soul, so
that in the image of God Himself, the first man would be complete. This, we must
understand in detail. For the body, prior to the spirit and the soul, was like the muddy
land of God’s great earth. For us to make a body complete, or to restore a body to its
proper state, we must add a special spirit to an otherwise incomplete land. This is where
our teaching and learning must be directed.31
31
Ibid. The Italian natural philosopher Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480-1539) clearly shared the view that alchemical
practices mirrored the workings of nature. Biringuccio’s best known work, “Pirotechnia,” was published in Italy in
1540 and may well have been read by Cortese. Citing passages from Pirotechnia regarding the manipulation of
stone for the construction of housing, Pamela Smith suggests that for Biringuccio, “alchemical methods imitated the
processes of nature. In his [Biringuccio’s] view, humans invented the arts by observing natural processes and
speeding them up through the processes that would come to be called alchemical.” Smith concludes that “alchemy
was the focal point of the debate about the power of nature to imitate art from the Middle Ages up through the
186
In devising chemical concoctions to cure illness, the healer emulates God’s creation of
man and the universe. In the beginning, God created a muddy mass of barren land. Imbued with
a divine spark, or virtuous spirit, the land took on God’s image. For the healer to “restore a body
to its proper state,” he or she “must add a special spirit to an otherwise incomplete land.” Indeed,
man himself is best understood via explanations of medicinal cures:
[Consider] the three principles of nature, that, according to certain philosophers, may
be called matter, form and essence. We shall make many medicines with our
knowledge of these three principles. Medicines are made of natural things, that is, of
matter, form and essence, and medicines may help the body and enliven the spirit. By
“matter,” we mean to say the body itself, the body’s “shape,” in a sense, refers to the
soul and by “essence,” we most closely refer to the spirit. Every “essence” experiences
generation and corruption, yet, it is by means of the spirit that the body and the soul are
properly combined in the union that is man.32
This idea of corruption preceding generation can be traced back to Aristotle. The notion
that a seed must “die,” or forfeit its original form and existence in order to grow, blossom, or be
part of something new, represented a basic idea with many early modern manifestations. Just as
the modern chef cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggshells, the early modern
alchemical healer needed to “kill” certain materials by extracting the vital spirits within them for
the purposes of constructing effective remedies. “A baker is an alchemist when he bakes bread,
seventeenth century.” See Smith, The Body of the Artisan. For a thorough examination of Biringuccio, see
Pirotechnia, published in Florence in 1540.
32
Ibid.
187
the vintner when he makes wine, the weaver when he makes cloth,” wrote Paracelsus in 1530.
“Therefore the individual who harvests natural fruits useful to humans in ways prescribed by
nature is an alchemist.”33
In one sense, the alchemist was the artisan who knew how to separate the valuable from
the worthless. “Carpenters were alchemists of wood,” explained Paracelsus, “as were sculptors
who do away with the unnecessary parts of wood so that they may make an image out of it.”34
But in another, more profound sense, the alchemist was the artisan who knew how to separate the
vital matter from the dross, how to extract the dynamic element from the larger compound, and
how to combine this property with other elements to reproduce the generative and productive
processes of nature. “All crafts are founded on the imitation of nature,” explained Paracelsus,
“[and] all crafts experience the properties of nature. Craftspeople know that in all their work they
follow in the path of nature and bring out of nature what is in her.”35
The alchemist was an enlightened cook. This special cook, along with the blacksmith,
metallurgist, physician, and countless other artisans, involved himself in the great art of
transformation. Such was the alchemical philosophy of medicine, and it explained man, nature,
and existence.
*
*
*
*
*
If we examine the first recipe found in Cap 50 of Isabella Cortese’s I secreti, we find her
instructions on “How to Sublimate Mercury.” Broadly speaking, by “sublimate,” Cortese meant
33
Quoted from Karl Sudhoff’s translation of Paracelsus’ 1530 Das Buch Paragranum in Samtliche Werke, vol. 8,
181.
34
Quoted from Sudhoff’s translation of Paracelsus’ 1553 Das Buch Labyrinthus medicorum genant in Samtliche
Werke, vol. 2, 189.
35
Quoted from Sudhoff’s translation of Paracelsus’ Das Buch Paragranum in Samtliche Werke, vol. 8, 181.
188
to purify or refine. According to historian of alchemy Stanton Linden, sublimation represents a
distillation process whose name derived from the “elevation” or “exaltation” of the materials
circulating in the chemist’s still. Over seventy years ago, historian John Read described
sublimation as, “the deposition of crystals in the cool upper part of a vessel containing heated
solid material in its lowest part….[W]hen repeated many times it was supposed to furnish the
‘quintessense’ of the material concerned.”36 As Cortese writes:
Take fresh mercury, Roman vitriol and put it in a saucepan, stir it and heat it up a bit,
extract the material that rises above the mercury, take all that seems to be decayed or
spoiled and put it in another pan under a light fire. Then add one oncia of a prepared
salt, all minced and chopped, and mix it together in a basin to purify it. When it has
been thoroughly sublimated, add, for the second time, one oncia of vitriol, another
oncia of salt, pulverize and crush it all together and put it down for further sublimation.
Then, for the third time, add an oncia of vitriol and minced salt and crush it all together.
You may do this four, five, six or seven times. But the Mercury will always grow in
weight and mass after the fourth time. It will grow heavier and never diminish and you
will have perfectly sublimated Mercury, impregnated with the spirit of vitriol.37
According to Stanton Linden, Sir George Ripley, one of the most famous alchemists of
late medieval England, wrote the following of sublimation in his Compound of Alchymy
(completed in 1471; first published in 1591): “Sublimation’s purposes are three—a) to make the
body spiritual, b) to make the spirit corporal and ‘consubstantial’ and ‘fixed’ with the body; and
36
37
Linden, The Alchemy Reader, 138.
Cortese, I secreti, bk. 2, chap. 51, fol. 58.
189
c) to cleanse the filthie originall.”38
Paracelsus used “vitriol” for sublimation processes as well. Today, vitriol is generally
associated with sulfuric acid, yet Paracelsus apparently made narcotics out of the chemical.
Whereas Cortese “impregnated Mercury with the spirit of vitriol,” Paracelsus seems to have done
the same thing for sulphur. After mixing in rosemary oil and “good wine,” two ingredients
frequently used by Cortese, Paracelsus produced a drug suitable for patients suffering from
epilepsy, syphilis, and dropsy.39
Cortese and Paracelsus used vitriol for different purposes, but they operated within
similar theoretical frameworks. In both instances, the spirit of vitriol “impregnated” another
substance, in Cortese’s case Mercury and in the case of Paracelsus, Sulphur. The Paracelsian
influence on Cortese seems indisputable. In this sense, Isabella Cortese’s 1561 I secreti would
seem to be part of the “Paracelsian/Hermetic revival” that Carlos Gilly and Cis van Heertum
suggest began in the 1550s.40
But a wide range of other voices influenced Cortese. Indeed, much of the alchemical
philosophy described above gained expression prior to the birth of Paracelsus. Sir George
Ripley, “one of the most famous alchemists of medieval England,” whose observations regarding
the purposes of sublimation fit neatly with the alchemical medical philosophy of the sixteenth
century, finished his work twenty-two years before Paracelsus was born.
Clearly, the foundations of early modern medical chemistry antedate Paracelsus. The
three medieval figures most closely associated with the alchemical philosophy movement of the
sixteenth century are Arnald of Vilanova (1235-1311), John of Rupescissa (d. 1362) and Raimon
38
Linden, The Alchemy Reader, 18.
Quoted from Multhauf, The Origins of Chemistry. Multhauf cites Paracelsus’ 1525 On Diseases that Deprive Man
of His Reason.
40
Gilly and van Heertum, eds., Magia, Alchimia, Scienza, vol. 2, 10-11.
39
190
Lull (1232-1315). According to Robert Multhauf, “the philosophical works of Arnald, Lull, and
Rupescissa are by no means alien to medieval alchemical ideology, and their medico-chemical
works are concerned with some of the favorite processes of contemporary alchemy, notably with
the process of distillation.”41 Michela Pereira suggests that “all of these men [Arnald, Lull,
Rupescissa, and Francis Bacon] assumed the aim of alchemy to be the production of an agent of
material perfection, the elixir, that can purge metals of their impurities as well as restore the
health of human bodies.”42
Arnald (1235-1311) taught conventional Galenic/Hippocratic medicine at the University
of Montpellier, where alchemy did not represent part of the official curriculum. But like many
scholarly, licensed, official medieval and early Renaissance medical practitioners, Arnaud
maintained two distinct approaches to healing: a theoretically, doctrinal, intellectually complex,
Latin based discourse of texts on the one hand, and a practical, empirically derived,
experimentally gleaned, non-conventional set of practices on the other. Arnald de Vilanova
wrote books on medical alchemy. In his major work, Rosarius (1280), Arnald writes of the
benefits of separation, extraction, and recombination of elements for the purposes of constructing
remedies.43 “In the Arnaldian Rosarium,” writes Michela Pereira , “the alchemical medicine is
extolled as a thing that has more active virtue than any other remedy, because of its occult and
subtle nature.”44 Like Paracelsus, Arnald emphasized the world’s changing nature, implying that
disease and illness must be understood within the context of a given physical environment.45 As
an alchemist, Arnald seems to have expounded on the sulfur-mercury theory of metal generation,
which John of Rupescissa took up one generation after Arnald’s death. The theory essentially
41
Multhauf, “John of Rupescissa and the Origin of Medical Chemistry,” 363.
Pereira, “Mater Medicinarum: English Physicians and the Alchemical Elixir,” 29.
43
See Read, From Alchemy to Chemistry, 27-29.
44
Pereira, “Mater Medicinarum: English Physicians and the Alchemical Elixir,” 29-30.
45
Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine, 252.
42
191
holds that all metals are composed of combinations of sulfur and mercury, and it dominated
Isabella Cortese’s mind. “We know that all metals are composed of mercury and sulphur,” she
wrote, adding “the mercury is the matter and the sulphur is the shape. The purity or impurity of a
metal depends upon the mercury and the sulphur within it and the influence they had.”46
John of Rupescissa’s influence on Isabella Cortese would seem equally self-evident.
Rupescissa believed the spirits obtainable through chemical distillation represented virtues, or
“quintessences,” and they possessed marvelous healing potential. In his treatise On the
Consideration of Quintessences, Rupescissa argued that extracted spirits represented the key to
healing solutions.47 In Rupescissa’s best known work, Liber lucis, his distilled mixtures of
saltpeter, Roman vitriol, and mercury to obtain “mercury’s sublimate, and his use of sal
ammoniac and “angel water” seem to leap off the pages of Cortese’s I secreti.48
The alchemical writings attributed to Raimond Lull rank among the most important to the
western alchemical tradition and the origins of medical chemistry. Lull’s Testamentum, written
in 1332, cites Arnald of Vilanova as an alchemical authority and extols Roger Bacon’s notion of
art assisting nature. The text conceives of a systematic “alchemical philosophy” with a detailed
set of practical processes and medical recipes. Throughout the text, Lull searches for the elixir:
This is the greatest stone kept hidden from the unlearned people by all the ancient
philosophers. It transmutes every base and imperfect metal into an agent that can
produce an infinite quantity of gold and silver. Moreover we say that it has more
efficacious virtue than all other remedies, and that it is capable of healing all illnesses
46
Cortese, I secreti, bk. 2, chap. 1, fol. 36-37.
Partington, History of Chemistry, vol. 1, 108.
48
Rupescissa, Liber lucis, vol. 2, 84b. I have used the translation from Latin to English provided by Multhauf. See
Multhauf, “John of Rupescissa and the Origin of Medical Alchemy,” 359-367. For further discussion on Rupescissa
and medical alchemy, see Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science, 3:347-369.
47
192
that affect the human body. Do not wonder of this remedy was sought for more eagerly
than any other, because in it all other remedies are encompassed.49
The omnipotent elixir can be obtained only through the extraction of the pure, essential
virtue that constitutes the core of material elements, usually defined as elementum virgo, or the
“fifth essence.” Sixteenth-century writers avidly debated Lull’s work, and Arnald’s fame grew
immensely. In the 1550s, when Cortese presumably was writing I secreti, Spain’s King Philip II
issued calls for foreign alchemists to prepare quintessences and medicines by distillation,
according to the practices of Raimon Lull, for the health of the human body.”50
But Isabella Cortese formally distanced herself from the forefathers of sixteenth-century
alchemical philosophy described above. In the preface of I secreti, Cortese wrote a lengthy note
to her brother-in-law, Mario Chaboga, about these famous writers:
I tell you, my dearest brother, if you wish to follow the art of alchemy and to operate
well in it, it is not necessary to follow the works of Geber, nor of Ramon [Lull], nor
Arnaldo [Villanova], nor of any of these philosophers, because they have not recorded
anything truthful in their books, but only falsehoods and riddles. I have read the most
detailed findings of Geber, “Recipe Lapidem in Capillisnostrum”—I have read and
reread it and I have found nothing favorable or useful.
Nor is there anything truthful in the epistle of Ramon [Lull] entitled “Recipe
Nigrum nigto nigrius,” or his other works, such as “Ascende in monde altiorem huitus
mundi” and “Inuenies la pidem absconsum.” I have studied these books for more than
49
50
Lull, Testamentum, 244, f. 57rb-va. I have relied on Pereira’s translation in “Mater Medicinarum,” 30.
Eamon, “Alchemy in Popular Culture,” 209.
193
thirty years and have never found anything good in them. I have wasted time and
almost lost my life and all my possessions. By the mercy of God I have been able to
find all that is good and useful in these matters, and, if you will permit me the honor, in
this life.
My dearest brother, I know that you have wasted a lot of time and spent a great
deal. Out of compassion for you, I beg you not to lose any more time on the books of
these philosophers. Simply follow the rules I have written down for you. Do not
increase or diminish anything, but do as I say and write, and follow my commandments
written below.51
How can we explain Isabella Cortese’s desire to disassociate herself from these
alchemical philosophers? Why did Cortese fail to mention Paracelsus even once in her book?
Perhaps the frustration of exclusion from formal circles of education provoked resentment of
established intellectual figures in Cortese. Maybe she simply conformed to the fashionable
rejection of ancient intellectual figures typical of the “professors of secrets.” Leonardo Fioravanti
and Alessio Piemontese were no fans of Galen and Hippocrates. Paracelsus himself attacked
many of the figures described above. In his book Great Surgery, Paracelsus acknowledged that
both Arnald and John of Rupescissa wrote about quintessences and vital spirits before him, but
he complained that their books “contained nothing of value” and were “mere boasting, devoid of
philosophy.”52 Or perhaps Isabella Cortese wanted her work to seem truly original.
But there may be another reason to explain Cortese’s disassociation from medical writers
like Lull, Arnald, Rupescissa, and Paracelsus. We must remember that the prime of Cortese’s
51
Cortese, I secreti, bk. 2, chap. 1, fol. 31.
Quoted from Waite, ed., Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus the Great, 22n. The translated text
comes from Paracelsus, The Great Surgery, bk. 2, chap. 13.
52
194
life, including the period in which she wrote I secreti, fell within the time span of the Council of
Trent (1545-1563). The eighteen year mission represented a legal side of the Catholic CounterReformation as orchestrated by the Holy Church. In Venice, the Council of Trent erected an
Inquisition designed to stamp out heresy within the state. Christian writers liked to describe
heresy as a sickness with a strong element of contagion. Ironically, physicians, surgeons, and
authors of medical treatises soon became major targets of the Inquisition’s suspicion. In 1547 the
Republic of Venice formed a new legal magistracy called the Tre Savia sopra Eresia and
combined it with the Patriarch of Venice, the Papal Nuncio, and the Grand Inquisitor to form the
tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition.53 The new institution soon began charging
substantial numbers of physicians, and the ‘Index of Prohibited Books’ began filling up with
volumes on medical philosophy. In 1574, the Paduan anatomist and surgeon Nicolo Bucella had
his belongings searched by an order of the Venetian Inquisition. The record shows that he was
stripped of a work by Paracelsus (“detractis tamen quisbusdam libris Teophrasti Paracelsi
tamquam haereticalia continentibus”) judged to be heretical. 54 In 1587, Claude Baniere was
detained by the Venetian Tribunal and charged with possessing prohibited books, which included
works by Raimon Lull, Paracelsus, and the alchemical medical philosopher Guglielmo Gratarolo.
Baniere was executed for heresy later that year.55 The Valgrisi bookshop, owned by the Valgrisi
publishing company which printed the “books of secrets” of Alessio Piemontese, suffered
constant scrutiny by the Holy Office.56 Venetian surgeon Girolamo Donzellini, executed for
heresy in 1587, was known to be a close colleague of one Pietro Perna, a man believed to be the
53
Romeo, L’inquisizione nell’Italia moderna, 8.
Palmer, “Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice,” 111.
55
Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, 222. Most of Raimon Lull’s major works were formally condemned by Pope
Gregory XI in 1376 and subsequently banned throughout Christian lands. We have seen, however, that Spain’s King
Philip II made use of Lull’s literature during the 1550s. Nevertheless, the condemnation was renewed by Pope Paul
IV in 1560, one year before Cortese published I secreti. See Turner, “Raymond Lull.”
56
Palmer, “Physicians and the Inquisition,” 126.
54
195
publisher, book seller, and smuggler most responsible for the Paracelsian revival in Italy during
the 1550s.57 Indeed, even the Inquisition of Tarragona had burned Arnald of Vilanova’s books in
1317.58
The wholesale condemnation of Paracelsian literature by the Holy Church did not occur
until after Isabella Cortese’s death, and it is difficult to definitively ascertain which volumes of
Lull and Paracelsus were forbidden during the period in which Cortese wrote I secreti. Indexes
of prohibited books can be tricky sources. Local jurisdictions often outlaw volumes that never
make their way to the encyclopedic lists published in larger cities.59 Nevertheless, it is safe to say
that at least some of the works of Raimon Lull and Paracelsus were prohibited during the period
of time in which Cortese wrote her book. Furthermore, if the work of certain alchemical
philosophers drew the wrath of the Inquisition, it is safe to say that no work of alchemical
philosophy could be owned without some risk. No wonder Isabella Cortese distanced herself
from men like Lull, Arnald, Rupescissa, and Paracelsus. She may have hoped to avoid arrest and
incarceration. Such a fate would have seemed cruel for a natural philosopher who had traveled
great distances over many years, collecting the secrets of nature.
*
*
*
*
*
From the medieval period down through the Renaissance, learned natural philosophers
sought legitimacy by associating their findings with the teachings of famous thinkers. As we saw
in Chapter 1, some writers falsely attributed their entire works to renowned ancient scholars. But
by the sixteenth century, many learned thinkers and neo-scholarly philosophers disassociated
57
Palmer, “Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice,” 113.
Ball, The Devil’s Doctor, 74.
59
See Infelise, I libri proibiti, Introduction.
58
196
themselves from the famous intellects of their time and fashioned themselves in opposition to
ancient authors. This tendency seemed especially strong in the field of medicine and the arts of
healing.
It is worth recalling the words of Paduan physician Giovanni Argenterio on this subject.
“No builder built a house according to the directions laid down by an ancient authority,” wrote
Argenterio in 1551. Ten years before the publication of Cortese’s book, Argenterio argued that
“because Galen wrote almost infinite volumes, he must have made many ill-considered
statements without thinking about them…hence, our stupidity should be even more condemned
when we receive all his books as absolutely true and attribute equal authority to each one.”60
Cortese related well to this point of view. In the earliest passages of I secreti she wrote, “For I
declare, that this age of ours, which surpasses by a large margin the ancient world in all things
and leaves our ancestors far behind, contains much to be known.” These lines come from the
dedication of I secreti to Mario Chaboga, the Archdeacon of the Kingdom of Ragusa. In this
same passage, Cortese humbly offers to make her knowledge of contemporary chemicals, metals,
and minerals available to the world for the sake of utility. But a keener preface might have been
provided by the Argenterio quote discussed in my first chapter:
Would not the ancients have made greater progress in philosophy if these most learned
men, who strove with one another in interpreting Aristotle and explaining his every
word in a recondite manner, had instead taken up the elaboration and illustration of
some part of philosophy treated more negligently by our forefathers? For meanwhile
because we examine with superfluous labor the vacuum, the infinite, the three
principles, and the opinions of the ancients, we are ignorant of the nature of metals and
60
Siraisi, “Sixteenth-Century Medical Innovation,” 168.
197
stones; nor do we know enough of the history of herbs and plants.61
Cortese would attempt to add to her generation’s knowledge of metals, stones, herbs, and
plants, with scant reference to ancient authority. But she would do so discreetly. In the passage to
her brother-in-law which opens the second section of I secreti, Cortese urges Mario Chaboga to
keep this new learning to himself. “You must be sure to maintain the secrecy of your work,”
writes Cortese, adding that the Archdeacon “should not let strangers enter the privacy of the
workshop.” Cortese counsels Chaboga to “not teach these arts to anyone…[for] revealing these
secrets will cause them to lose their efficacy.” This desire to maintain secrecy is not easily
reconciled with remarks in the dedication of the book in which Cortese expresses the hope to
make the knowledge she has gleaned about nature available to the rest of the world and takes
deep pride in providing others with a work of great utility. How can we understand this paradox?
Cortese’s emphasis on the maintenance of secrecy has historical roots within the natural
philosophical traditions informing her work. Although Cortese’s book belongs to a sixteenthcentury movement in natural philosophical writing concerning nature’s secrets, the “secreti”
tradition has ancient roots, dating back to Hellenistic times. In the Hellenistic East, where the
occult sciences originated, “natural philosophy” generally implied purely esoteric learning, with
strong spiritual implications, appropriate only for a chosen group of special thinkers. This
basically “gnostic,” or revealed, knowledge possessed a sacred character and had to be carefully
guarded from the misguided use of those unable to properly appreciate its full meaning. In this
sense, Cortese’s emphasis on maintaining secrecy dates back to an intellectual disposition shared
by Europe’s earliest natural philosophers.
The influence of the sixteenth-century revival of Hermeticism constitutes a more direct
61
Cortese, I secreti.
198
influence on Cortese’s work, however, and this also emphasizes maintaining secrecy among the
learned. In textual terms, “Hermeticism,” or the revelations attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth,
called Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice Great”) by the Greeks, basically refers to two major
treatises: the Corpus Hermeticum (the philosophical revelations of Hermes) and the “technical
Hermetica,” which were tracts on astrology, alchemy, medicine, and magic. These works
constituted the central texts of the school of mystical philosophy known as Neoplatonism.
Beyond the pale veneer of mundane existence, the Neoplatonists believed, there lies an unseen
networks of structures and forces all corresponding to divine reason.62 In 1460, Florentine
humanist Cosimo de’Medici hired the scholar Marsilio Ficino to translate the Corpus
hermeticum into Latin. Ficino’s Latin translation of Hermeticum, which would have been
entirely comprehensible to Cortese, was printed three times in Venice between 1481 and 1493.63
But in 1548, thirteen years before the publication of Cortese’s I secreti, Florence’s Editio
publishing house printed Tommaso Benci’s Italian translation of Hermeticum. Cortese refers to
“Hermes” (the only ancient authority she cites) three times in her book and the influence of
Neoplatonist thought, as shall be demonstrated below, is prevalent throughout her work. But the
Hermetic tradition, as understood during Cortese’s lifetime, considered authentic knowledge of
the natural world a matter of divine revelation that required careful guarding and proper
maintenance.
This point may be illustrated with a letter written by a first-century AD medical student
named Thessalos of Tralles which made its way into a treatise on medicine attributed to the
Egyptian pharaoh Nechepso, one of the fabled recipients of the Hermetic revelations. Thessalos
relates the story of his lifelong quest to understand the secrets of nature for the purposes of
62
63
Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 145.
Gilly and van Heertum, eds., Magia, Alchimia, Scienza, 10-11.
199
healing and his ultimate meeting with Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. Asclepius reveals to
the student the secrets of collecting the plants and minerals necessary to produce effective drugs
and the knowledge of the stars required to do so. But he orders Thessalos not to “reveal the
secrets to any profane person who is a stranger to our art,” lest the secrets lose their power.64
But if Isabella Cortese subscribed to the notion that “revealing secrets to the vulgar was
to cast pearls before swine,” as the English physician Sir Thomas Browne remarked in 1646,
why did she express gratitude for the opportunity to share her knowledge in her dedication to
Mario Chaboga? Was she simply conforming to literary convention, as Francesco Bernardo,
Nicolas Antonio, Fedele Honofri, Antonio Boldini, Claudio Amelli, Leonardo Fioravanti,
Alessio Piemontese, Timotheo Rossello, and dozens of other “professors of secrets” had done in
the dedications, prefaces, and introductions of their volumes? Perhaps. But that only pushes the
question back further. Why did Cortese write her book and attempt to get it published in the first
place?
It is a safe bet to assume that Isabella Cortese hoped to sell her book and generate
revenue. Sixteenth-century Venetian publishing houses looked fondly upon approval from
statesmen or aristocrats within the Venetian empire. Mario Chaboga, the Archdeacon of the
Kingdom of Ragusa, occupied an important position of state within a defacto colony of Venice.
The approval of Cortese’s brother-in-law undoubtedly contributed to her successful attempt to
publish her book. Furthermore, the highly specified table of contents, the itemized nature of each
recipe, and the easy-to-follow style of the book’s organization indicate the commercial aspects of
Cortese’s work. Many paragraphs conclude with warm phrases of encouragement such as “you
shall do well,” and “it will be done,” and these results “will be of much use to you.” Clearly,
Cortese hoped to make money with her book. She probably did benefit financially. Venetian
64
Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 20.
200
publishing houses printed ten editions between 1561 and 1677, and German translations of I
secreti were published in Hamburg and Frankfurt in the 1590s.
The fact that Isabella Cortese took knowledge gleaned from Latin-based texts and wrote a
volume in a vernacular language indicates that her position regarding the necessity of
safeguarding crucial information from the vulgar represented little more than rhetorical
posturing. The fact that Cortese went to great lengths to publish her book leads one to believe
that personal ambition outweighed her sympathy for those aspects of Hellenistic and Hermetic
thought that emphasized the selective dissemination of knowledge regarding nature.
*
*
*
*
*
Isabella Cortese claimed to have traveled widely in search of nature’s secrets, herbal
medicines, and chemical concoctions from natural philosophers throughout Italy and Central
Europe. She specifically mentions learning ideas and collecting medicines from as far away as
Hungary and Egypt in the pages of I secreti.65 But Cortese’s autobiographical portrayal may well
have represented an attempt at conforming to the well-known late sixteenth-century stereotype of
the wise professor of secrets as globetrotter. The appeal to worldly experience and the benefits of
travel have been proposed by many early modern natural philosophers. Paracelsus wrote,
“Whoever wishes to explore nature must tread her books with his feet….writing is learned from
letters; nature, however, by traveling from land to land, one page.” Paracelsus claimed, “thus is
the Codex Naturae, thus must its leaves be turned.”66 In fact, the image of Paracelsus as the
wandering scholar, traveling from town to town, exploring, investigating, and collecting the
65
Cortese, I secreti; see “Introduzione, Al Molto Rever Monsignore il Signore Mario Chaboga Digniss.
Archidiacono di Ragusi,” fol. 13.
66
Quoted from Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine, 56-57. Pagel translates a passage
from Defensiones un Verantwortungen wegen etlicher verunglimpfung seiner Missgoner.
201
secrets of nature while gleaning ideas from others along the way, may well have provided the
prototypical image late sixteenth-century professors of secrets modeled themselves after.
Alessio Piemontese, the “professor of secrets” most fully discussed by Tommaso
Garzoni, certainly portrayed himself as a wise traveler. In the preface of his Secreti di reverendo
Alessio Piemontese, he relates how his passion for philosophy and the secrets of nature sent him
on many a “journey throughout all partes of the world, without resting or sojourning at any time
in one place above five monthes.”67 According to Piemontese, he “spent much of [his] life
traveling from place to place, collecting ideas not only of men of great knowledge and profound
learning, but also poor women, artificers, peasants, and all types of men.”68 Leonardo Fioravanti,
another “professor of secrets,” also boasts of great travels dedicated to learning. “I set to go out
into the world,” explains Fioravanti, “and began to walk the earth and plough her seas, seeing
many cities, provinces, practicing with various kinds of persons, medicating many men and
women with all sorts of infirmities.”69 Paracelsus’s Danish pupil, Peter Severinus, exhorted all
naturalists to “sell your lands, burn up your books, buy yourself stout shoes, travel to the
mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the shores of the sea, and the deepest depressions of
the earth.”70 It is no wonder that Tommaso Garzoni portrayed these “professori di secreti,” as
itinerant, groundless, shifty, wandering types whose rejection of traditional learning had sent
them off in all different directions.
Nevertheless, one must wonder if Cortese really had traveled the globe in search of rare
secrets and true learning. The fact is, virtually everything she discusses in I secreti was readily
available in her hometown during the very period in which she wrote her book. Practically every
67
Piemontese, Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio piemontese. See the preface to the reader; in my copy the
passage cited above appears on fol.*ii.
68
Ibid.
69
Fioravanti, Il tesoro della vita humana, 17v-18.
70
Quoted in Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 161-162.
202
herb, plant, chemical, and compound covered in Cortese’s treatise changed hands in daily
Venetian commercial transaction during the sixteenth century. Furthermore, information and
ideas related to virtually every recipe or set of instructions offered by Cortese had been published
by Venetian presses. When discussing sixteenth-century medicinals commonly used by learned
physicians and empirics, contemporary natural philosopher Pandolfo Collenucio described
Venice as “that great centre for the diffusion of information as well as commodoties.”71 In his
study of sixteenth-century European pharmacies and commercial exchange of medicinal
materials, Richard Palmer confirms, “few cities [as Venice] can have visited so much by leading
botanists and natural historians.”72
The Venetian republic played the most important role of any European political entity
during the early modern revolution in “materia medica” and the newly developed interest in
medicinal herbs that peaked during Cortese’s lifetime. By virtue of Venice’s geographic position
and political hegemony, the republic was well situated to lead the way. Venice ruled islands such
as Crete and Cyprus, which were considered to have been the herb gardens of antiquity, and the
republic enjoyed unrivaled trading relations with Constantinople, Syria, and Egypt. Pietro
Mattioli, the physician hired by the Venetian republic to catalogue the history of medicinal herbs
compiled by Dioscorides, urged the Venetian Senate to procure from all parts of the world where
its galleys sailed the true herbs, liquors, and minerals so urgently desired for the best medicines
throughout the decade of the 1540s. According to my rough count, approximately ninety percent
of the herbs deployed in Cortese’s I secreti can be found in Mattioli’s 1548 Materia Medica
Dioscorides.
In 1545, the Venetian republic founded an official state botanical garden at the University
71
72
Palmer, “Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice,” 102.
Ibid., 103.
203
of Padua. The Paduan botanical gardens would serve as a collecting point for plants and minerals
from wherever medicinal simples were to be found. The garden became a crucial center of study
for the construction and testing of medicinals based on the manipulation of herbs and minerals.73
In his 1536 study of pharmacies and medicinals entitled Examen Omnium Simplicium, Antonio
Musa Brasavola referred to Venetian pharmacies more than those of any other city. Valerius
Cordus used his stay in Venice in 1544 to build up a store of important medicinal simples
unavailable in Germany. Prominent physician Conrad Gesner visited the botanical gardens of
Girolamo Cornaro, a former governor of Cyprus, on the Venetian island of Murano in 1544, for
the purposes of study and consolation. Venetian patrician Pietro Antonio Michiel established his
own botanical garden of medicinals as did Venetian doctor Maffeo Maffei. The gardens of both
men attracted interest from heavyweights in early modern natural philosophy like Pietro Mattioli,
Ulisse Aldrovandi, and Giuseppe Falloppia. According to Richard Palmer, “gardens such as
these, together with the presence of merchants and traders in materia medica from East to West,
made Venice a forum where the latest botanical news could be discussed and new specimens
examined.74 Simply put, by the time Isabella Cortese set down to write I secreti, her native city
had emerged as the capital of medicinal herbs and minerals and the place where natural
philosophers visited to learn ideas and collect materials for the purposes of healing.
*
*
*
*
*
Did Isabella Cortese deliberately misrepresent herself in her opening remarks of I secreti?
Were her claims of distant travel for the purposes of diligent research, careful observation, and
meticulous collection misleading? Was all the information presented in her book readily
73
74
Laughran, “Medicating With or Without ‘Scruples,’” 102.
Palmer, “Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice,” 103.
204
available in her native city all along? Does I secreti represent a regurgitation of unoriginal
thought cloaked in a veneer of rhetorical fashioning? Did Cortese slap a superficial
understanding of famous thinkers and time-honored traditions of learning onto an unwieldy
collection of disparate thought? With no further historical information available on Isabella
Cortese, only further evaluation of her work’s epistemological foundations can shed light on
these questions.
I secreti represents an epistemological puzzle. As previously mentioned, many of
Cortese’s medicinal recipes would seem to be informed by folkloric perceptions of health, or
vernacular healing practices among non-learned people outside university. For example, if we
consider Cortese’s recipe for creating “Borax for the Orifices,” we find:
Take a rock of saltpeter in a saucepan and heat it until it begins to liquefy, then
pulverize it into a ground dust. Mix it with several oncie of cow’s milk and boil it in a
new pan. Be sure to stir it often until it is well mixed. Then put the new mixture in a
well-sealed glass container. Bury it under a manure dunghill and let it lay for thirty
days.75
One might easily assume that Cortese’s penchant for burying maturing concoctions in
manure piles (this suggestion appears in many recipes) had its origin in orally transmitted
folklore among countryside healers lacking formal education.76 This may well be true, as popular
healing practices at the everyday level of early modern Italian life often included the use of
75
Cortese, I secreti, bk. 2, chap. 20, fol. 48.
For other examples of making the most of manure, see I secreti for Cortese’s remedy of “Oil of Human Bladders,
Which Can Heal Wounds in Twenty-Four Hours and Relieve the Pain of Gout,” bk. 1, chap. 8, fol. 22. Here, Cortese
recommends storing a sticky, gooey substance in the final stages of its preparation in a glass jar and burying it under
a dunghill for two months.
76
205
animal manure and dungheap piles.77 One suspects manure’s positive image stemmed from
perceptions of the generative power implicit in “fertilizer” and the natural warmth associated
with piles of dung. But burying maturing medicinal concoctions in manure piles made its way
into many printed books as well. In La cirurgia (Venice, 1570), Leonardo Fioravanti employs
manure in a recipe for the elixir itself. With a remedy filled with Cortesian ingredients such as
mugwort, aloe, cinnamon, red and white roses, ginger, rosemary, and musk from the Levant,
Fioravanti proposes alchemical distillation and burial in horse-dung for a period of forty days.78
Paracelsus himself deploys manure in the Archidoxa, his first book dedicated to
alchemical medicine:
Take gems, margarites, or pearls, pound them into somewhat large fragments, not into
powder, put them into a glass, and pour on them so much radicated vinegar as will
exceed the breadth of four or five fingers. Let them be digested for an entire month in a
dung-heap, and when this is over the whole substance will appear as a liquid.79
Of course, the fact that such ideas gained expression in learned, or neo-scholarly,
publications, hardly means they did not originate outside the narrow circles of formal learning.
Charles Webster, one of the leading authorities on Paracelsus in the English speaking world, has
consistently argued for a strong epistemological relationship between Theophrast von
Hohenheim and popular belief. “His [Paracelsus’] writings indicate familiarity with a wide range
77
See Bernoni, Tradizioni popolari veneziane di medicina, and Coltro, Dalla Magia alla Medicina Contadina e
Popolare.
78
Fioravanti, La cirurgia, fol. 97r, “Fare Elixar vitae, o Aqua Coelestis.”
79
Paracelsus, Archidoxa, quoted from Waite, ed., Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus the Great, pt. 2,
32. Although Archidoxa was not published as a complete text until 1569, or eight years after Cortese’s “I secreti,” it
should be pointed out that all of Paracelsus’s major works were published after his death in 1541. Shorter
Paracelsian articles, however, did circulate in manuscript form and are known to have been available to avid readers
of natural philosophy in the first half of the sixteenth century.
206
of folklore,” wrote Webster in 1980. “More than any other figure of his time, Paracelsus
attempted to synthesize a heterogenous body of folklore into an ordered body of knowledge
compatible with reformed theology and science. Agricola and Paracelsus both came into daily
contact with popular belief concerning nature [and] formed a high estimation of vernacular
sources.”80
Our judgment concerning Isabella Cortese’s perception of vernacular practices and
folkloric wisdom may be enhanced by considering her words in the letter to Mario Chaboga
which opens Book Two. In discussing the virtues or spirits buried within the less valuable
properties of nature’s physical objects, Cortese advanced a lecture of metaphors and analogies
when she wrote:
The peasants know more of such things than we do because when they collect the
wheat from the earth they learn. They collect the neck, the straw and the stem of each
plant and they appreciate the different parts. The straw and the stem represent the
matter, the grain itself is the shape and the soul the plant. When you want to sow the
grain you do not sow the matter, that is, the straw, but rather you sow from the neck
and take the grain itself, that is the shape and the soul. It is necessary for those of us
who want to sow gold that we sow from its shape and take seed rather than just the
matter of the metals we use.81
If we examine Cortese’s recipe for male sexual dysfunction we find an interesting mix of
ideas with strong implications of vernacular influence:
80
81
Webster, “Paracelsus and Demons,” 18-19.
Cortese, I secreti, bk. 2, chap. 1, fol. 37.
207
To Make the Male Member Straight
Take three oncie of borax and an equal amount of the oil of storax, mix in one part
sambucino and two oncie of crushed large wing ants after they have been dried. Add in
one part dried amber and an equal amount of dried musk, mix them all together until
they have been well blended. Apply directly as often as necessary.82
The ingredients of this recipe may seem to reside entirely outside the parameters of
learned medicinal prescriptions. But certain facts qualify such a view. Firstly, the exotic
chemical “borax,” which Cortese deploys many times in her book, circulated in legally
sanctioned commercial exchange within the Venetian republic. Borax represented an important
chemical agent in metallurgical industries for its use in the promotion of fusion. Like so many
commodities, borax was imported into Europe through Venice. Venetian refineries held a virtual
monopoly over the purification and distribution of borax. According to William Eamon, fellow
“professor of secrets” Alessio Piemontese “appears to have been the first to record the process
for refining borax, thus violating an important trade secret…of a compound [whose] ingredients
were thought to be known only by Venetians.”83
“Storax” represents a liquid drawn from the bark of the tree Liquidambar orientalis.
According to the Giunti Dictionary of Early Modern Venetian Dialect, storax has been used for
perfumery and medicinal needs for centuries.84 Philologically, one finds storax commonly
associated with balsam and amber, two agents deployed throughout Cortese’s book. Webster’s
Dictionary uses the expression “Friar’s Balsam” to describe storax, which may point to a
82
Cortese, I secreti, bk. 3, chap. 63, fol. 94.
Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 146.
84
Boerio, Dizionario del Dialetto Veneziano.
83
208
characteristic of many healing ingredients found in early modern medical treatises: the
implication of spiritual or religious context.85 Simply put, neither borax nor storax were
unknown to the early modern Venetian establishment.
Nevertheless, Cortese’s use of two oncie of “crushed large winged ants” would appear to
represent an alternative pharmaceutical tradition. While the vast majority of herbs and chemicals
deployed in Cortese may be found in Mattioli’s encyclopedic work on medicinals for the
Venetian republic, many of her natural ingredients would seem to reside outside the parameters
of official medicine.
But this should not be taken to mean Cortese simply fabricated her remedies. In his study
of popular medicine during the Counter-Reformation, Nives Fedrigotti has uncovered a recipe
for the “oil of scorpions” that closely resembles Cortese’s formula for “scorpion’s oil.”86
Although the exact date of the recipe remains unknown, it was stored in a monastery following
the Council of Trent (1545-1563), hence, it must have originated either during or before the
lifetime of Isabella Cortese. With its characters arranged in an inverted triangle, to “accentuate
their analogical and magical image,” this recipe offers relief for renal failure, intestinal stones,
kidney pain, aches of the female genitals, and earaches.87 It may also be used to induce urination.
Both Cortese’s recipe and the formula discovered by Fedriotti call for boiling scorpions
in oil. Both recipes use wine. Both call for placing the final solution in the sun for exactly forty
days. Unlike the recipe discovered by Fedriotti, which seems to have been written in southern
Italy, Cortese’s formula makes use of the Venetian liquid borax.88 While the exact relationship
between the two recipes may never be definitively established, we may conclude that Cortese did
85
The New Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language, International Edition, 1989.
Fedrigotti, “Medicina popolare e Controriforma,” 33-74. Fedrigotti never mentions Cortese’s “I Secreti.”
87
Ibid., 54.
88
Cortese, I secreti, bk. 1, chap. 4, fol. 19.
86
209
not have to travel to Hungary for her formula on “scorpion’s oil.”
Epistemological relationships between folkloric practices and Cortese’s methods may be
further appreciated by consulting the records of Venetian Inquisition trials following the Council
of Trent. During the second half of the sixteenth century, the Holy Office tried dozens of people
(mostly women) for theologically invalid approaches to healing, improper use of sacred elements
(like crosses and holy water), and the inappropriate use of pious rituals, like signing, blessing, or
performing tokens of benediction, reserved for licensed clerics. Female healers known to treat
fevers, sores, bleeding wounds, various skin diseases, gout, headaches, coughs, and a range of
digestive disorders, among other things, appeared before the tribunal during Isabella Cortese’s
lifetime. The Holy Office cared little for the purely material aspects of the healing in question;
the Inquisition sought mainly to “clean up popular culture” by eliminating the improper
appropriation and exploitation of holy practices and sacred elements by healers outside the
official church.89 Nevertheless, valuable insights regarding the beliefs and practices of vernacular
healing may be gleaned from the trials.
Elena Crusichi, also known as “La Draga,” represented one of Venice’s most well known
healers from the middle of the sixteenth century through the 1580s. Tried twice by the Holy
Office, Crusichi claimed to treat patients suffering from virtually every ailment described above.
When asked about the nature of her cures, Crusichi replied, “I give to the needy many medicinal
remedies.” But Elena Crusichi had no formal medical education. In 1571, the Holy Office
interrogated Crusichi regarding her healing practices over the last twenty years.
One remedy for unhealthy children described by Crusichi includes “six hearts of rue, five
of southernwood, five of wormwood, five of lady’s mantle and five cloves of garlic…mixed with
89
See Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power, especially chap. 4, “The Women Priests
of Latisana: Apollonia Madizza and the Ties that Bind,” 130-174.
210
oil and burned over a fire.”90 A second remedy for chronic coughing consisted of “a syrup of rue,
sage and wine boiled together and then dissolved in honey.”91 With the exception of
“wormwood” and “lady’s mantle,” every ingredient described by Crusichi may be found in
Cortese’s I secreti. While Crusichi’s formula for cough syrup could easily constitute a recipe in
Cortese’s book, the mixture of rue, southernwood, garlic and oil raises some significant
differences between La Draga and Cortese. Crusichi’s remedy for unhealthy children included a
ritual that would be foreign to the pages of I secreti. As Crusichi explained:
I pour…oil of the laurel with the mixture [described above] over the child. I want the
child to be oiled in the form of a cross…..I say, ‘In the name of Christ and of the
glorious Virgin Mary and of the Holy Trinity that the Lord be the one who liberates you
from this disease. This oiling one does on the third Thursday of the moon. When
Sunday comes I do the bath. I take a little water boiled with the coals and mix it with
the remains of the herbs [described above] and as I oil the child I wash him in the form
of a cross. Once washed I have this child sleep between two people. When I have
finished the washing I have the water from the bath thrown into the sea, saying, ‘As this
water flows away to sea, so too goes away all of your sickness.92
No such healing practices appear in Cortese’s book. In fact, the methods described above
imply that the boiling of rue, southernwood, wormwood, and garlic in oil do not represent an
90
Archivio di Stato Venezia (henceforth “A.S.V.”), Sant’Ufficio, Busta 30, f. 2v-3r. Any errors of translation are my
own. For a higher level of paleographic translation, see Milani, Antiche pratiche di medicina popolare nei processi
del S. Uffizio (Venezia, 1571-1591), Corso di Letteratura delle Tradizione Popolari. See also Ruggiero, Binding
Passions, Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power, 130-174.
91
A.S.V., Sant’Ufficio, Busta 30, 1571, f. 4v. Also discussed in Milani, Antiche pratiche, 32.
92
A.S.V., Sant’Ufficio, Busta 30, 1571, f. 2v-3r.
211
attempt to forge a chemical agent for purely physiological effect. For Crusichi, the ritual
summoning the forces of god and nature represent the essence of the remedy; the “healing”
ingredients would appear to be symbolic or coincidental to the actual cure. Nevertheless, some
interesting parallels between Crusichi and Cortese exist.
The two healers use a similar set of ingredients. Oil represents the primary physical
agent.93 Both women seem to be “washing away” illness—Crusichi dispatches the sickness out
to sea with discarded water, while Cortese often seems to mix her healing remedies with her
solutions for dyeing, cleansing, and spot removal. But most importantly, both healers make use
of the processes of distillation and separation in fashions seemingly influenced by early modern
alchemical medical philosophy. In discussing Crusichi’s healing methods, Guido Ruggiero
suggests that “La Draga’s oil was quite complex in its formulation, and its medicinal qualities in
the modern sense, that is, its chemical properties, may have actually had some effect and been
intended to have some effect.” But as Ruggiero points out, Crusichi seemed to use oil in a
different way as well. “What the oil represented in nature was another form, usually a higher
one, of that aspect or part of the body that would bring the body back to harmony. The oil drew
the underlying power from the thing in nature and transferred it to its parallel in the body,
reinforcing and strengthening it.”94 If Ruggiero is correct, then La Draga deployed oil in a
fashion similar to alchemical medical philosophers of the Paracelsian/Hermetic tradition.
Chemically treated oil represented a “living agent” that drew out the “virtues” and “essence” of
the materials it touched, combining with other elements to form powerful medicines.
The Holy Tribunal’s case against Giovanna Semolina in 1584 sheds further light on
shared assumptions and similar healing practices across the social scale of early modern Venice.
93
94
Oils far and away dominate Cortese’s list of ingredients in “I secreti.”
Ruggiero, Binding Passions, especially chap. 4, “The Women Priests of Latisana,” 151.
212
Tried for heresy and maleficiam, Giovanna enjoyed a reputation as a successful healer for many
years prior to her day in court.95 “I do not interpret dreams, nor read futures, nor answer glaring
questions,” she told the inquisitors. Instead, Semolina professed to “treat burns, sores, cuts and
ulcers.” The elderly healer cured “hernias, vaginal problems, epilepsy, gout, ringworm and
broken bones.” She offered cures for impotent men and eased the suffering of women in labor
and plague victims.96
Insisting on a good, strong pot and plenty of coals, Semolina described potions composed
of sabine, sulphurwort, hog’s fennel (finochio), sea-sulphur, seaweed, herb bennet (garafania),
and wood avens. This non-licensed healer used sow-thistle (cicerbita), milk-thistle, and milkweed. As with Isabella Cortese’s remedy for ringworm (Cap 25 of I secreti), Semolina suggests
mixing a “chunk of fallow ground” into one boiling mixture.97 As with the case of Elena
Crusichi, metaphysical differences would seem to separate the healing practices of Isabella
Cortese and Giovanna Semolina. Yet the two healers used the same ingredients, sought to benefit
from similar processes of distillation, and shared common assumptions about the nurturing and
generative powers of the physical world.
But Isabella Cortese shared assumptions and similar sets of medical practice with nonlearned healers higher up on the social scale than “La Draga” and “La Semolina.” In 1567 the
Holy Office brought the Franciscan friar Antonio Volpe up on heresy charges and suspicion of
Lutheranism.98 The Franciscan holy man operated a distillery in Campo San Salvatore, right in
the heart of Venice, and sold “medicinal waters.” Referring to himself as “the Canker Friar (il
frate del cancro)” Volpe claimed to enjoy business relationships with a wide variety of
95
A.S.V., Sant’Uffizio, Busta 53, 1584, Contra Ioannam cognominatum Semolina maleficam. As a healer, Giovanna
Semolina was known as “La Semolina.”
96
A.S.V., Sant’Uffizio, Busta 53, 1584, fol. 2r-4r.
97
Ibid., 8r.
98
A.S.V., Sant’Uffizio, Busta 23, 1567, fol. 13r-27v.
213
physicians, surgeons and empirics in Venice.99 With his “water of life” remedy, Volpe
specialized in the treatment of syphillis (Mal Francese). Like Isabella Cortese, Volpe bragged
about traveling as far as Hungary to obtain his formula and technical know-how.
Antonio Volpe admitted to having no formal medical education. Instead, he preferred to
talk about his distillation skills.100 Since many witnesses at his trial knew Volpe as “the Canker
Friar,” it is a safe bet to assume that he was fairly well known. Although the Inquisition asked
few questions about the chemical properties of Volpe’s “water of life,” the case implies that
medicinal distillates enjoyed a fairly broad popularity in Venice during the 1560s.101
Even the holy order of the Jesuati engaged in the production of distilled medicines in
sixteenth-century Italy. “The ‘aquavit-brothers,’ as they were sometimes called,” explains
William Eamon, “specialized in making elixirs and cordials, which they believed perserved the
body from corruption and putrefaction.” Giovanni Andrea di Farre, a Jesuati brother, composed a
book of medical alchemy entitled Libro de I secreti e ricette in the mid-sixteenth century.
According to Eamon, “the manuscript contains numerous illustrations of alchemical apparatus
and detailed descriptions of distillation procedures…enumerating hundreds of remedies for
ailments affecting all parts of the body. Much is devoted to mal francese (syphilis).”102
In conclusion, it would seem safe to say that Isabella Cortese’s medical philosophy
shared much with everyday perceptions of health or vernacular healing practices among nonlearned people outside university. Perhaps the influence of alchemical theory in Cortese’s work
allowed her medical philosophy to be easily reconciled with a broad sweep of early modern
views regarding health and healing. After all, in its broadest manifestations, early modern
99
Ibid., fol. 18r.
Ibid., fol. 20r.
101
Eamon, “Alchemy in Popular Culture,” 198.
102
Ibid., 199.
100
214
alchemical philosophy provided a series of principles with great hermeneutic potential: a) belief
that matter was alive and imbued with spirit, b) belief in the generative and nurturing powers of
nature, c) belief that the physical world possessed all the healing agents necessary for humanity,
and d) belief in the possibility of physical transformation of matter. These interpretative building
blocks could be appropriated by a wide variety of medical philosophies.
Pamela Smith suggests that since alchemical theory assigned spiritual meaning to
material things, alchemy provided a broadly shared set of ideas for understanding life in the early
modern period. “Alchemy comprised a discourse on the relationship of matter to spirit,” writes
Smith, suggesting that like religion itself, alchemical texts provided an intellectual framework
with which people might think about nature.103 The view that alchemy “cured” matter and
restored the human soul and the physical world from their postlapsarian corruption is relevant
here.104 Since alchemy assigned spiritual meaning to material things and concerned itself with
transformation and restoration, alchemy addressed the most fundamental challenge of the human
condition—redemption after the expulsion from Eden. In this sense, redemption and restoration
represented the essence of all the human arts and no body of thought addressed them as directly
as alchemy. “Alchemy in the early modern period,” explains Smith, “both articulated and
sometimes formed the resources for a vernacular science of matter.” Smith suggests “we think
about this vernacular science of matter as forming a kind of common intellectual currency in the
early modern period that can be found in alchemical treatises, medical therapies, and all practices
associated with changes of state and transformations of matter.”105 Hence, Smith believes that
103
Smith, The Body of the Artisan, 145.
The view that the alchemist restores all things to their original pristine nature before the fall of Adam and Eve
was quite popular in the Renaissance. According to this idea, all metals were gold prior to the fall and all bodies
were healthy. The alchemist simply restores things to their original quality. For the most recent discussion of this
idea, see Young, Faith, Medical Alchemy, and Natural Philosophy, especially the introduction.
105
Smith, The Body of the Artisan ,145.
104
215
since virtually all early modern medical philosophies looked to the potential power of nature, the
divine spark present in matter and the possibility of transformation, all views on healing were in
accord with an alchemical worldview. That may be true, but that does not mean that alchemical
philosophy produced or generated commonly held views of early modern healing. It only means
alchemical philosophy could be easily reconciled with a variety of medical thought during the
Renaissance.
John Henry has suggested that historians of medicine have posited a common medical
worldview that extended to almost all members of society and medical practitioners during the
early modern period. According to Henry, the medical hierarchy in the Renaissance was more a
matter of social distinctions than theoretical or intellectual divisions.106 While the first of Henry’s
ideas does not stand up to critical scrutiny—some early modern people believed health was a
matter of maintaining humoral balance and keeping in harmony with nature via proper living,
while others viewed illnesses as concrete ontological entities that invaded the body and
necessitated expulsion—Henry’s conclusion remains interesting. Roger Chartier and Peter Burke
suggest historians view knowledge in early modern Europe as being held in common, but used
differently, by all levels of society and to abandon the dichotomy of popular and elite.107
Such a view would seem to make sense when comparing the medical philosophy of
Isabella Cortese, to the extent that we can conceive of such, with actors at various levels of the
Venetian social scale. A certain set of shared assumptions and similar practices seemed to tie
Cortese to vernacular healers like La Draga and La Semolina, learned theologians with no
medical training like Antonio Volpe and Giovanni Andrea di Farre, neo-scholarly medical
philosophers like Leonardo Fioravanti and Alessio Piemontese, and famous thinkers like
106
Henry, “Doctors and Healers: Popular Culture and the Medical Profession,” 191-221.
See Chartier, “Culture as Appropriation,” as well as Burke, “Overture: The New History, Its Past and Its Future,”
and Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society.
107
216
Paracelsus, Arnald of Vilanova, John of Rupescissa, and Raimon Lull. At the same time,
Cortese’s healing propositions and medicinal prescriptions often differed significantly from the
members of each group listed above. Hence, rather than dividing medical knowledge up into
camps of “learned” and “non-learned,” it may make more sense to think in terms of class
systems while comparing and contrasting healing practices at different social levels. In this
sense, Cortese’s elaboration of medical alchemy would be better understood by considering how
knowledge intersects with social status rather than searching for clues regarding the circulation
and transmission of ideas.
Such questions will be considered in subsequent chapters. For now, it will suffice to say
that Isabella Cortese’s work was decidedly derivative. Neither her remedies, nor the conceptual
frameworks from which they flowed, seem to be original. Few of her “secrets” seem to have
been secrets at all.
*
*
*
*
*
Isabella Cortese’s I secreti does not belong in a literary genre of learned alchemical
medical philosophy. When comparing Cortese’s work to that of Raymon Lull, Arnald of
Vilanova, John of Rupescissa, or even the unorthodox Paracelsus, the differences outweigh the
similarities. A critical reading of Cortese’s dedication to the Archdeacon Chaboga and a careful
analysis of the passages in which she directly addresses her brother-in-law may reveal several
things; one finds a familiarity with several longstanding ideas in the history of western thought,
such as the micro/macrocosm view of humankind and the cosmos and the idea of the physical
world as provider, or nature as a giant warehouse of potential remedies waiting to be discovered.
Strong Hermetic, Neo-Platonic, and Paracelsian influences appear throughout the text. Indeed, at
217
times it seems as though Cortese is convinced that alchemical distillation, or the extracting of
key ingredients within a given substance and the skilled combination of those “virtues” or
“essences” with other substances, represents the key to constructing effective medical remedies.
But these ideas represent part of a larger whole that often fails to maintain theoretical and
ideational consistency.
Paracelsus once wrote, “In natural philosophy heaven and earth, air and water are a man,
and man is a world with heaven, earth, air and water….We must understand, therefore, that when
we administer medicine, we administer the whole world.”108 This all-encompassing view,
derived from strands of thought from Lull, Arnald, Rupescissa, fifteenth-century hermeticism,
and others, would seem to be easily reconciled with the views of man, nature, God, and healing
advanced by Cortese in her letter to Mario Chaboga. But Cortese neglects and ignores many
other aspects of the western alchemical tradition. No trace of the “elixir,” the “quintessence,” or
the “fifth element” can be found in the pages of I secreti. Apparently, Cortese did not believe one
superior healing agent existed. Cortese never mentions the postlapsarian corruption and the fall
from grace following Adam and Eve’s explusion from Eden. This idea, central to many early
modern alchemical views, never gains expression in I secreti.
Isabella Cortese never elaborates a coherent, systematic medical ideology. She puts forth
a few principles that reveal the influence of sixteenth-century alchemical medical philosophy,
but Cortese never explicitly lays out a working theory of the body, health, sickness, and healing.
In a sense, this fact may actually work to Cortese’s advantage. Unencumbered by the need to
arrange, explain, and reconcile her vast array of recipes with any overarching theory, Cortese
remains free to collect a mosaic of eclectic ideas and solutions. But certain parts of the book are
impossible to reconcile with other sections.
108
Quoted from Goodrick- Clarke, Paracelsus: Essential Readings, 166.
218
If we consider Cap 28, entitled “A Perfect Unguent for Various Nuisances,” we see a
recipe consisting primarily of fresh eggs, rosewater, and liquid storax. Cortese directs the reader
to pulverize, sublimate, and blend the ingredients. Two independently prepared solutions must be
mixed together. Upon completion, Cortese assures the reader that “you will have a solution that
refines the blood, balances the humors and dries off unhealthy coolness.”109 This lapse into a
Galenic framework of humoral theory undermines those sections of the book informed by the
alchemical philosophy of medicine. In fact, this unguent is difficult to reconcile with the very
next remedy offered, which promises a solution that will cure wounds within twenty-four hours
of topical application.
The sporadic appearance of astrological considerations in Cortese’s healing methods also
raises critical questions. In approximately one dozen sets of instructions, Cortese rigorously
employs theories of astrological healing. But most of the rest of I Secreti neglects the heavenly
bodies. The recipe for an unguent in Cap 4 must be prepared when the sun is in the constellation
of Leone. Book Two begins with a 350-word discourse on how to capture the spirit of Saturn,
but much of the rest of this section ignores the significance of any such thing. One may wonder
how certain theories of astrological healing can be applied haphazardly. Comprehensive and allencompassing, learned astrological healing theory does not lend itself to selective application.
Unrestrained by any compulsion to reconcile her methods and practices with a central body of
thought or overarching theory, Cortese remained free to take instruction wherever she could find
it. This lack of paradigmatic theorizing yielded an eclectic mix of ideas, a stream of suggestions
and solutions, a paradoxical bag of tricks and surprises. Never grounded in a totalizing
philosophy, Cortese’s thought spun out in a variety of directions, seeking less to explain than to
discover.
109
Cortese, I secreti, bk. 1, chap. 28, fol. 30.
219
Chapter Four
Boundaries, Turf Wars, and Scathing Critiques:
Various Types of Medical Practitioners Examine Each Other,
1550-1680
In 1558, Laurent Joubert received his doctorate in medicine and philosophy from the
University of Montpellier. The native Frenchman had considered attending the University of
Heidelburg, but when Guillaume Rondelet, chancellor of Montpellier’s Faculté de Medecine,
extended a personal invitation, Joubert did not resist. Eight short years after his graduation,
Joubert himself would aspire to the position of Medical Chancellor.1 This represented quite an
achievement. In late sixteenth-century Europe, only the Italian universities of Bologna and Padua
enjoyed finer reputations than Montpellier. But it did not take long for Joubert’s scholarly
reputation to reach the hills and plains of northern Italy. In 1557, one full year prior to his official
graduation, Catherine de’ Medici invited Joubert to be her personal physician.2
No further recorded correspondence between Catherine de’ Medici and Laurent Joubert
survives. Hence, we may assume Joubert did not accept every royal offer that came his way.
Besides, Montpellier kept the young man busy. In addition to his administrative and pedagogical
duties, the Chancellor maintained a steady practice. He also wrote books. Writing, in fact, seems
to have constituted Laurent Joubert’s major professional interest.
Joubert composed medical treatises in Latin and French and many of his works were
translated into Europe’s most popular vernacular languages. Joubert’s first three books,
Medicinae practicae priores, Isagoge therapeutices methodi, and De affectibus inernis partium
1
2
Dulieu, “Laurent Joubert: Chancellier de Montpellier,” 139-67.
Joubert, Popular Errors: Translated and Annotated by Gregory David de Rocher, Introduction, xiv.
220
thoracis, represented rigorous technical treatises on method and practice. In some of his later
3
works, however, Joubert moved away from methodology and application in order to describe his
theory of human biology and corresponding medical philosophy. Traite du ris (Treatise on
Laughter), published in 1577, represents one such work.4 Written in the French vernacular, the
book produced several editions and probably circulated among a broader audience than Joubert’s
earlier publications.
There is nothing humorous, however, about Joubert’s most famous work, Erreurs
populaires. Originally published in 1578, the volume represents Joubert’s reflections on healing
in general and the medical profession in particular. As with Trait du ris, Joubert wrote Erreurs
populaires in the vernacular, probably in order to reach the widest possible audience. But the
book served to reaffirm the primacy of Latin-based, scholarly learning, at the expense of all
healing methods gleaned and practiced outside university. In this overarching evaluation of
contemporary healing, Laurent Joubert advanced a polemical notion of the “legitimate”
professional medical hierarchy. For the Chancellor, orthodox medicine constituted the only
proper form of healing, and only university-trained, scholarly practitioners, fully versed in logic
and natural philosophy, could be trusted to cure illness. Thoroughly trained and properly licensed
medical philosophers, according to Joubert, restored the sick to health. Untrained, naïve, and
ignorant amateurs—charlatans, mountebanks, midwives, quacks, and cunning women—did more
harm than good for the credulous sufferers who desperately sought medical assistance.
Indeed, Joubert’s ideological diatribe, which sought to emphasize the boundaries between
orthodox medicine and empirical practice, initiated something of a genre in late Renaissance
3
Joubert, Medicinae practicae priores, Isagoge therapeutices methodi, and De affectibus inernis partium thoracis.
All three works, written in 1577, were combined and published in a single volume, Tractatus alter, in 1578 and
again in another compilation entitled Opera Latina in 1582.
4
Joubert, Traite du ris.
221
medical writing. Over the next several generations, with Joubert’s explicit encouragement,
trained medical practitioners throughout Europe published similar volumes, criticizing the
fraudulent practice of amateur healers while emphasizing the exclusive legitimacy of universitytrained medical practitioners. Italy’s Scipione Mercurio and Cosimo Aldana, England’s John
Securis, James Primrose, and Thomas Browne, Germany’s Johannes Dryander, and France’s
Jean Bodin, to name a few, followed Joubert’s example with self-serving proclamations of
professional legitimacy reserved for their own scholarly class of medical practitioners.
Opposing voices fought back in print. Authors of self-help medical books, remedy
vendors, “professors of secrets,” disgruntled physicians, and other social critics published
responses to the tyranny of “professional medicine” and the pretentious nature of self-obsessed
scholars more concerned with logic and philosophy than curing illness. As shall be described in
the pages below, Italy’s Leonardo Fioravanti, Alessio Piemontese, and Isabella Cortese, France’s
Rene Choppin, and Denmark’s Peter Severinus, to name a few, defended the legitimacy of
healers outside university from the polemical attacks of Joubert and his followers. Within the
scholarly world, professors of medicine such as Giovanni Argenterio, university-trained
physicians like Levinus Lemnius, and natural philosophers such as Francis Bacon questioned the
wisdom of traditional education while issuing provocative critiques of learned medicine. Indeed,
the scramble for social and cultural legitimacy and the battle for space within the medical
marketplace of early modern Europe included an elaborate war of words.
This chapter examines some of the similarities and differences among the various types
of prominent healers in early modern Europe by going straight to contemporary testimony. As
usual, northern Italy serves as the focus of this inquiry. But many non-Italian sources shall also
be considered, and the chapter may be read as a modest survey on western European medicine
222
during the later Renaissance. A variety of printed texts are analyzed to shed light on the basic
assumptions, common sets of healing practices, and typical remedies deployed by licensed
physicians, neo-scholarly medical practitioners, self-styled empirics, and other non-learned
everyday healers. The scathing critiques and ideological polemics exchanged by members of the
various camps are examined to emphasize the differences alleged to exist among healers at the
various social levels. But in a larger sense, this chapter shall attempt to critically examine how
modern historians typically think about early modern European medicine.
If we accept the purely dichotomous, binary arrangement of Laurent Joubert’s medical
world into two distinct camps—proper, legitimate, licensed, scholarly medicine versus
illegitimate, ignorant, fraudulent quackery—we run the risk of oversimplifying the daunting
complexity of early modern healing practices. We must analyze Joubert’s text as a rhetorical
construction in order to avoid the blind alleys and false views his self-promoting portrayal
attempted to impart. Similarly, if we take Leonardo Fioravanti and Alessio Piemontese’s
rejection of scholarly medicine at face value, we fail to appreciate all those areas in which these
self-styled empirics did proceed from university-based, learned perceptions, unconsciously or
otherwise, regarding health and healing. Imposing a textually based, binary oppositional analysis
on the vast array of early modern healing phenomena inevitably ignores more than it considers.
Within the vast chasm residing between the bi-polar descriptions of self-serving voices resides a
larger, more telling understanding of early modern healing.
*
*
*
*
*
“There is a certain kind of error founded in pure superstition,” wrote Laurent Joubert in
223
1578, “committed by fools who think it a sin against God if they call a physician to heal their
ills.” According to Joubert, such fools generally “claim that in calling the physician, one is
resisting and opposing the will of God, who visits their bodies with afflictions for their own
good.”5 Joubert challenged this view by quoting the Book of Ecclesiastics, which, according to
him, suggests “the sick are devoutly and wisely exhorted first to reconcile themselves with God,
whom they have offended, then to seek help from a physician whom God has created and to
whom He has given knowledge in order to be glorified in His wonders.”6
Laurent Joubert considered the trained physician to be reared and nurtured in the image
of God and blessed with sacred power to spread holy glory on earth. But such a sacred position
necessitated protection from imposters. Joubert dressed his position on this question in pious
language as well, writing “Every day Terence’s proverb is found to be most true: there is nothing
more foul and unjust than an ignorant and untrained man.”7 According to Joubert, “this
complaint is confirmed in our art [medicine] more than in any other, as can easily be seen by the
near infinite list of errors and mistakes committed in this line of work.” For Laurent Joubert, “the
right man for the right job” constituted a holy maxim.
In Chapter IX of Book One in Erreurs populaires, Joubert writes:
It is a strange thing that the science of medicine is deeper and more difficult than any
other, yet the dullest of idiots does not fail to pass judgment on the knowledge of
physicians. In order to judge someone’s ability soundly and fairly, one must at the very
5
Joubert, Erreurs populaires au fait de la médecine et régime de santé, bk. 1, chap. 4, fol. 40, from my copy
professionally microfilmed from Venice’s Biblioteca Marciana.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 7, fol. 4. Apparently, “Terence’s proverb,” which Joubert does not describe in detail in my
version of Erreurs populaires, refers to “Terence, Adelphoe, 1. 98: homine imperito numquam quicquam
iniustiust….” See Joubert, Popular Errors, 288n (found on page 56 in de Rocher’s translation).
224
least belong to the profession and know something about it.
8
Towards the end of the same passage, Joubert concludes:
Thus, it is improper to determine the ability of physicians by their success, which is due
more to chance and to the grace of God than to the skill of man. One must nonetheless
not infer or conclude from this that it makes no difference which physician one calls. It
is commonly said, “God helps those who help themselves.” But one must search out the
best means one can to help oneself.9
But how could the sacred art of medicine be helped? As we have seen, when Joubert
went to press, medicinal practice itself had some health problems. Helpless physicians watched
epidemics like syphilis and plague carry off vast percentages of late sixteenth-century
Europeans. Galenic/Hippocratic humoral theory, which provided the theoretical foundation upon
which scholarly medicine rested, faced its stiffest and most widespread critique among learned
men in many centuries. A torrent of medical books, written by those a bit lower on the social
scale, rolled off the printing presses, attacking learned medicine for its misguided principles and
obsolete methods.10 What were the most fundamental problems plaguing the science of medicine
and the art of healing?
The central dilemma, Joubert suggested, was that “everybody makes medicine his
8
Joubert, Erreurs populaires, bk. 1, chap. 9, fol. 54.
Ibid., fol. 56.
10
This point will be thoroughly discussed in Chapter 5 of this dissertation.
9
225
business.” In Chapter XI of Book One, he wrote, “there are very few people who do not think
11
they know a lot about medicine—even more than physicians.”12 Joubert complained bitterly of
the “meddlers” who contaminated the profession by opportunistically seeking to benefit from the
sickness of others. “Almost everybody is copying the prescriptions of physicians, taking sick
people’s pulses, examining urine, giving opinions, and ordering the very opposite of what the
physicians say.”13 Joubert reserved special criticism for “cunning women” and ill-trained
midwives, who received much undeserved credit. “Women have never invented a single proper
remedy,” he charged, suggesting that wholesome medicines “all come from the domain of the
physician or from our predecessors.”14 For Joubert, women lacked the aptitude and capacity for
critical, theoretical thinking and had not the skill or background to understand rationale, logic,
and the relationship between cause and effect. The Chancellor dismissively suggested that
women “refrain from reading” several parts of his book, “for they would not understand.”15
Other French writers soon took up Joubert’s medicalized gender war. Licensed
physicians Gervais de La Rousche (1587) and Jacques Guillemeau (1609) wrote of the
obstetrical horrors committed by ignorant midwives in the birthing chambers.16 In 1610, the
Parisian Thomas Sonnet de Courval complained of “toothless, wrinkled, chattery, and
superstitious taperbearing old women who dare to involve themselves in medicine.”17 In France,
11
Joubert, Erreurs populaires, bk. 1, chap. 9, fol. 69
Ibid.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 3, fol. 173.
15
Ibid. See, for example, chap. 4, “Whether There is a Certain Knowledge of the Virginity of a Maiden,” fol. 208.
16
For a discussion on pamphlets by Gervais de La Rouche, see Petrelli, “The Regulation of Midwifery during the
Ancien Régime,” 276-292. Jacques Guillemeau’s 1609 work entitled De l’heureux accouchement des femmes is
discussed in Bourgeois and Perkins, Midwifery and Medicine in Early Modern France, 143-46. See also Brockliss
and Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France, especially “The Medical Role of Women, 262-273, and
Lingo, “Empirics and Charlatans in Early Modern France,” 583-603.
17
Sonnet de Courval, Satyre contre les charlatans et les pseudo-médecins empyriques, quoted from Brockliss and
Jones’ The Medical World of Early Modern France, 266. On page 58 of his book, Sonnet de Coryal urged the
12
226
as elsewhere, when licensed physicians took up their writing instruments for the sake of
defending their positions in the medical marketplace, female healers invariably served as targets.
But Joubert also lambasted ill-trained male barbers, uneducated surgeons, charlatans,
mountebanks, quacks, and the latest class of “merchants who, in order to cut in on a portion of
the profession, are master meddlers.”18 In 1578, the “university of physicians of Montpellier,”
undoubtedly led by Joubert, joined with the master surgeons of the city to “exterminate all
empirics from this city.”19 Two years later, the Catholic physician Andre du Breil of the
University of Paris warned Henri III that “empirics were ruin[ing] your republic.”20 As P.J.
Amoreux, Louis Dulieu, and Gregory D. de Rocher suggest, Joubert’s work had considerable
impact within the learned medical communities of France and beyond.21 Much of Europe looked
to Montpellier for intellectual and ideological direction within the art of medicine and healing;
now the Chancellor of Faculte de Medecine called for scholars and learned men to take the battle
to the streets. Erreurs populaires was soon translated into Latin, and Joubert invited scholarly
physicians everywhere to record popular errors concerning medicine and health for the
development of a large catalogue. In speaking of this very period, William Eamon writes, “the
physicians declared total war on what they regarded as ‘superstitions.’”22 Not surprisingly, a
leading Italian medical philosopher soon took Joubert up on his offer.
“legitimate physicians” of Padua and Montpelier to “pick up your pens, join yourself with my party, fight to combat
and vanquish the diabolical sect of ‘empyriques’ that ruin our art.”
18
Ibid., bk. 1, chap. 11, fol. 69.
19
Lingo, “Empirics and Charlatans in Early Modern France,” 583. While these groups seem to have had legal battles
in mind, their strategy apparently turned more towards publishing diatribes against empirics and winning popular
support among the hearts and minds of patients.
20
Ibid. Lingo cites du Breil’s La police de l’art et science de la médecine, 42.
21
See Dulieu, “Laurent Joubert: Chancellier di Montpellier,” 139-167, and Gregory D. de Rocher’s introduction
(xiii -xxvi) to his translation of Joubert’s Erreurs populaires.
22
Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 262.
227
*
*
*
*
*
Gerome Scipione Mercurio (1540-1615) studied medicine at the universities of Bologna
and Padua. He graduated from the latter as a licensed physician in 1568. Mercurio also worked
his way into the Dominican priesthood, taking his habit in 1574. Historians of medicine
interested primarily in practice and method remember Mercurio for his work on Caesarean
section surgery, obstetrics, and female anatomy. But this Dominican priest left several legacies
behind. Scipione Mercurio was a medical anthropologist, social critic, and prolific author.
Dr. Mercurio practiced medicine mostly in Rome. But in 1574 he emigrated to France
and took a position as ordinary physician in Paris. In France, Mercurio seems to have come
under the influence of Laurent Joubert. Before long, the general practitioner, obstetrician,
licensed surgeon, and ordained priest found yet another calling; Scipione Mercurio became an
avid spokesperson for Galenic/Hippocratic medicine.
Like Joubert, Scipione Mercurio believed that only university-educated medical
philosophers actually cured illnesses. Proper healing necessitated rigorous training in
Aristotelian logic and full immersion in the time-honored tradition of Galenic teaching. Mercurio
warned that poorly trained, uneducated, ignorant healers actually did their patients more harm
than good. Without proper understanding of humoral balance, individual temperament, and the
relationship between cause and effect, the amateur healer’s irrational methods subjected
credulous sufferers to unnecessary danger. Following Joubert’s orthodoxy, Mercurio divided the
art of healing into bi-polar camps of legitimate and illegitimate. University-educated physicians
and licensed apothecaries cured illness with the sacred art of medicine; charlatans, mountebanks,
remedy peddlers, and other quacks deceitfully robbed the gullible while degrading the noble
228
science of healing. Worse, pretentious females posing as “cunning women,” or experienced
midwives, performed tasks that ought to be reserved for legitimate physicians. Half of them, for
Mercurio, were probably witches.
While visiting Venice, Mercurio condemned the “errors committed in the piazza” by
empirics and charlatans, who spread their poisonous remedies and filthy lies on the credulous
public. For Mercurio, it was incomprehensible that people could actually buy “remedies made of
useless junk…authorized by some vagabond, approved by a clown and encouraged by some
whore.”23 In Rome, he complained that “without a second thought or worry, almost everyone for
a headache or other basic problem, runs first to a malefica or witch to be signed by her.” It
troubled Mercurio that, “for childbirth ailments, people go to be treated by women who are really
witches, although they are called by other names, such as segnaresse.” According to Mercurio,
basic medical problems such as “common fevers, wounds, infections, broken bones and even mal
francese,” sent hordes of Romans not to legitimate physicians, but corrupt, contemptible, and,
quite possibly, evil women.24
Mercurio devoted significant attention to female healers. In his tome entitled La comare o
raccoglitrice dell’eccellentissimo Signor Scipione Mercurio, filosofo, medico, cittadino romano,
Scipione discussed female anatomy, sexual reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth, and the proper
care of newborn infants.25 Much criticism of early modern birthing practices, or the medical
techniques deployed in the birth chamber, where midwives delivered newborn children, resides
within the pages of this volume. The early modern European birth chamber tended to be
dominated by female medical practitioners, and Mercurio distrusted them. How many midwives
23
Scipione, De gli errori popolari d’Italia, libri sette, 266.
Ibid., 310.
25
Scipione, La comare o raccoglitrice dell’eccellentissimo Signor Scipione Mercurio. I shall refer to my copy of
this volume professionally copied by Venice’s Biblioteca Marciana.
24
229
had studied Hippocrates and Galen in their original Greek, or mastered the scholastic logic
implicit in humoral theory while memorizing the Latin verse of a Taddeo Alderotti or Conrad
Gessner?
Anatomical images gleaned directly from scholarly medical texts, primarily Vesalian in
nature, appear throughout the Mercurio’s La comare o raccoglitrice. Throughout this work
Scipione Mercurio refers to Hippocratic and Galenic medical teaching, grounded in Aristotelian
logic, as proper, legitimate medical knowledge. Mercurio relentlessly contrasts such teaching
with the “everyday experience” (quotidiana esperienza) and “commonly held views” (l’opinion
piu comune) of amateur medical practitioners outside university.26 In a section discussing how
people ought to understand the differences between human beings and animals and the
implications of such differences for perceptions of human health, Mercurio complains of
“popular errors regarding the complexion of humans.”27 In the same section, Mercurio warns of
common “misunderstandings regarding astrology” and its implications for human health.28
Toward the conclusion of Book One, Mercurio complains that peasants (contadini) glean ideas
about health and healing from their views of nature but seem not to appreciate crucial differences
between the inferior sublunary sphere of earth and the superior perfection of the upper cosmos.29
Trust the learned teaching of Hippocrates, Galen and Aristotle, exhorts Mercurio, not the
mythology of contemporary women.30
A less scholarly but more incisive warning regarding the dangers of untrained female
healers came from the pen of the Florentine Cosimo Aldana. In his Discourse against the
26
Ibid. See pages 29 and 33 of Book 1 for examples of the phrases and the contexts described above.
Ibid., bk. 1, 34.
28
Ibid., 38.
29
Ibid., 56.
30
Ibid., 45.
27
230
Common Herd: In Which Good Reason Calls to Task Many of Their False Opinions, Aldana
blasted the false beliefs, errors, and misguided ways of common folks:
“What do you stupid people think?...[D]o you think that a poor old hag might know
something [about healing] when she has spent all her days in some shack spinning with
the geese and the hens? What do you commoners think that she could know, if she were
not a witch? And if she is a witch, do you want to be cured and returned to health by the
Devil’s work?...I say freely that I would rather die than regain my health with the
Devil’s art….Therefore, common people, I tell you for your own good when you are
sick go to male doctors, and…do not believe in those old ignorant women.31
Fear of diabolical healing or maleficial cures, of course, existed for centuries before
Aldana. The Council of Trent (1545-1563), in fact, had stirred such debate throughout Italy. In
1576, the leading Franciscan expert on exorcism advanced a provocative position on this
question. Fra Girolamo Menghi unequivocally declared death more desirable than life sustained
by maleficial cures. Originally published in Bologna, Menghi’s Compendio dell’arte essorcista e
possibilita delle mirabili e stupende operationi delli demoni e dei malefici con i rimedii
opportuni all’infirmita maleficiali went through at least twelve editions by 1605.32 Although a
theologian concerned with the holy ritual of exorcism, Menghi’s identification of possession and
31
Aldana, Discorso contro il volgo; In cui con buone ragioni si reprovano molte sue false opinioni, cited from
Ruggiero, “The Strange Death of Margarita Marcellini,” 1143.
32
See O’Neil, “Discerning Superstition: Popular Errors and Orthodox Response in Late Sixteenth-Century Italy”
(doctoral dissertation, Stanford University), especially 232-233 and 301-303.
231
cleansing with ‘healing’ sparked a lifelong interest in medicine. Like Joubert, Mercurio, and
33
Aldana, Girolamo Menghi (1529-1609) preferred university-based medicine to amateur healing.
The Franciscan priest’s bias toward licensed, official, well trained healers is revealed in the
following passage from Compendio, which warns exorcists to avoid playing doctor:
Instead of the exorcists that they ought to be, they turn themselves into herbalists,
charlatans, or even physicians. They do this by searching for some form of herb to use
against demons. And they give all sorts of syrups and medicines, powders, pills and
other such things to the possessed and bewitched, without the advice of physicians and
against the commandments, rules and orders given them in books, presumptuously
usurping the role of the physicians. With these things they may, from time to time,
chase the very souls out of the bodies along with the [evil] spirits.34
While Mercurio, Aldana, and Menghi lambasted amateur healers in southern Europe, the
English professional physician John Securis performed a novel form of “medical examination” in
the northern part of the continent. In 1566, Securis surveyed the full range of healers across the
social scale of Winchester, London, and Salisbury. He did not appreciate what he found. Ill
trained barbers, butchers with dull knives passing themselves off as surgeons, illiterate women,
and deceitful merchants made a mockery of the sacred heart of medicine. “A shamefully diverse
assortment of frauds [are] compounded by the endless gullibility of the populace who willingly
33
Giovanni Romeo and David Gentilcore have both made this point with regard to Girolamo Menghi. See Romeo,
Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe nell’Italia della Controriforma, 120-121, and Gentilcore, Healers and Healing in
Early Modern Italy, 16.
34
Menghi, Compendio dell’arte essorcista, as quoted in Romeo, Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe nell’Italia della
Controriforma, 138. I have consulted a 1987 edition of Menghi’s book from Harvard University’s Widener Library.
232
give almost anyone the benefit of the doubt,” wrote Securis, “even if the healer was a Sir John
Lack-Latin, a peddler, a weaver, [or] some presumptuous woman.”35 Securis feared much the
same held for Paris as well.
Securis’s A Detection and Querimonie of the Daily Enormities and Abuses Committed in
Physick discusses physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, establishing the author’s interpretation
of the proper education and conduct necessary for each vocation.
Born in Salisbury, England, probably around 1530, Securis studied medicine at
Winchester College, Oxford, and the University of Paris. He also dabbled in pharmacy, working
like a modern intern in apothecary shops administered by his school in France. In 1554, before
completing his medical education, he published “A gret galley lately come into England out of
terra nova laden with phisitions, poticaries, and surgeons.” The volume is a polemical diatribe
attacking misguided and ill-trained healers.
John Securis, like Laurent Joubert and Scipione Mercurio, seems to have been obsessed
with distinction. The word “Securis” represents the latinized version of the man’s original
English surname “Hatchett.” The good doctor’s entire professional career seems to have been
consumed with efforts to establish, maintain, and enforce standards of professionalization and
codes of conduct in order to separate legitimacy from illegitimacy. Even before he became a
doctor himself, John Hatchett Securis lectured others on the qualities of legitimate physicians.
Shortly after receiving his license to practice medicine, Securis published a pamphlet
concerning the licensing of physicians by Episcopal authorities. The volume contained seven
35
Securis, A detection and querimonie of the daily enormities and abuses committed in physick, fols. 4 and 5. See
also Deborah Harkness’s soon-to-be-published essay, “Sir John Lack-Latin, a Peddler, and a Presumptuous Woman:
Situating Women’s Medical Experiences in Elizabethan London,” 1. I am indebted to Professor Harkness, who
listened to my ideas for this chapter and directed me to the work of Securis with many valuable suggestions for
understanding Elizabethan medical debate. See also Bakewell, “Biography of John Securis” and Aikin, Biographical
Memoirs of Medicine.
233
proposals: that anyone who hoped to practice medicine in the diocese and was not a graduate of a
university, should only do so on receipt of a diploma from the bishop or his chancellor; that
surgeons should be required to prove their literacy; that apothecaries should be prohibited from
prescribing medicine (they should only be permitted to fill prescriptions written by licensed
physicians); that no unlicensed person should practice healing in any form; that midwives should
be sworn before the bishop; that apothecary shops should be inspected from time to time by
licensed physicians; and finally, the stipulation probably closest to Securis’s heart, that no one
should ever assume a university degree which he did not lawfully possess.36 Simply put, the man
would have been an inspiration to modern malpractice attorneys.
John Securis does not seem to have been a significant player in the war of words between
licensed physicians and amateur healers during the Renaissance; historians have been unable to
discern his date of birth or year of death. Nevertheless, his ideas typify the feelings many trained
physicians held about empirics, charlatans, mountebanks, and midwives. A better known
university-trained physician, who shared Securis’ views on healing, can be found in the person of
James Primrose. Born in France, Primrose (1592-1659) attended the University of Bourdeau,
where he decided to embark upon a career in medicine. Like Securis, Primrose studied at Paris
before matriculating to Joubert’s University of Montpellier in 1615. With his 1638 publication
De vulgi in medicina erroribus, Primrose clearly took up Laurent Joubert’s invitation to wage
war against amateur healers.37
36
Securis, A detection and querimonie of the daily enormities and abuses committed in physick. In my copy of this
volume, which was downloaded and printed at Folger’s Shakespeare Library, Securis’s “Seven Articles Concerning
the Administration and Use of Physicke” starts on fol. 40 and ends on fol. 49. Pagination may vary.
37
Primrose specifically mentions Laurent Joubert in the preface of Popular Errours, suggesting that the former
Chancellor of Montpellier did the medical world a fine service with his pioneering work but did not go far enough.
“He [Joubert] hath meditated quite a bit upon this subject, but hath left the work imperfect, having unfolded but a
few errours, and those not very grosse.” See Primrose, Popular Errours (originally published in 1638), “The
Author’s Preface,” B3.
234
De vulgi in medicina erroribus represents a systematic attack on the non-scholarly
practice of medicine. In 1651, the book was translated into English as Popular Errours, or
Errours of the People in Physick. Multiple editions in English soon followed—a strong
indication of the volume’s popularity. Primrose offers many ideas in his four hundred and fifty
pages of manuscript. But few of them were original.
Like Joubert and Mercurio, Primrose begins by noting “the great number of physicians”
in the world today. “Men presently give credit to everyone that professes himself to be a
Physician,” wrote Primrose, “although oftentimes greater danger is likely to be caused by the
physician than by the disease.“38 The unusual abundance of healers provoked the author’s
suspicion. “We must explain in the first place,” writes Primrose, “who may lawfully practise
Physick properly so called.”39 According to Primrose, “Physitions that are created in the
Universities doe justly practice, [but] so do ministers, mountebanks, runnagate quacks and
women who are said to meddle in surgery.”
Primrose acknowledged the criticism many amateur healers directed at the scholarly
physician’s emphasis on ancient language and rote learning. “For although the knowledge of the
Tongues [Greek and Latin] doth make way for the understanding of all the Arts,” writes
Primrose, “the physick’s skills are not acquired without new labor, care and industry. Diseases
are not cured with eloquence.”40
Let the people from henceforth, think him a learned Physician, not that knowes a little
Greeke and Latine, or some other Science besides Physick, but who being well
38
Ibid., 62.
Ibid., 1.
40
Ibid., 3.
39
235
instructed in the Rules of Physick, and well read in Galen and Hippocrates, understands
thoroughly the Diagnostick, Prognostick, and Therapeutick parts of Physick; for he that
is either wholly ignorant of these things, or understands them but meanely and in part,
can scarcely be accounted a good Physician. But who is he that shall judge these
things? For they are not a few, who having gotten some fame among the people, and
become renowned with a certaine name of Learning which never read Galen and
Hippocrates, doe study very little, and follow some new Writers scarce worth the
reading. Some things must be said about such.41
Indeed, Primrose wrote an entire tome about such things. He blasted the followers of
Paracelsus as “misguided” and “unworthy of further comment.” According to Primrose, “such
imposters must cloak and hide the deceits of their chemical remedies under the cover of all their
knaveries.”42 For all their nonsense, they flatly “misunderstood chemistry.” He took aim at the
collection of healers describing themselves as “professors of secrets” and charged them with
deceit, ignorance, and fundamental misunderstanding. In a section entitled “Errors of the People
About the Use of Remedies,” Primrose exposed the false medicinals of fraudulent healers. “How
so many men and women are beguiled, where all do busie themselves in gathering receits
[recipes] when oftentimes those remedies…did at the first come from some physician, who
himselfe had nothing that was secret.” According to Primrose, authentic remedies can never be
“secretive.” On the contrary, an efficacious remedy must have a firm basis in philosophical logic
and medical rationale. “Those remedies are the best which are nothing secret,” he wrote, “but
41
42
Ibid., 3 (italics added).
Ibid, 34.
236
best knowne, as being confirmed with more certaine experience.” Ill trained, ignorant peddlers
43
of silly solutions may think they have stumbled onto some great secret of nature. But naivete lay
at the root of their enthusiasm. “All the remedies in the world do not mean anything,” added
Primrose, “if one does not understand diseases.”44
Like Joubert and Mercurio, Primrose reserved keen criticism for female healers. “Who is
able to refrain from laughter,” he asked, “when he sees women feele the pulse [of a patient]?”
“Yea, silly women doe it. But the manner of knowing [understanding] the pulse is difficult; for
every difference hath its peculiar manner of knowing it, which if one be ignorant of Galen and
the Ancients, one will never find out.”45 Primrose ridiculed women that boiled gold in broth in
order to cure consumption, among other sicknesses.46 Simply put, women did not receive the
university education necessary for legitimate healing.
But if the misconceived notions of unskilled country folk, the pretentious nature of the
urban remedy peddlers, and the popular errors of the self-styled empiric bothered Primrose, the
credulous, gullible nature of paying consumers that flocked to the piazzas and squares troubled
him equally. Primrose complained of the weak-minded Londoner fooled by the deceit of the
mountebank and charlatan, especially with regards to poison antidotes:
There is an experiment of theirs, which the people admire, the Mountibank applies a
Viper to his breast, and taking the Antidote feeles no harm. At this the people stand
amazed. But here is manifold deceit. Firstly, as Matthioli saith, these fellowes have
sundry wayes to tame their vipers and serpents. Secondly, vipers in England, in respect
43
Ibid, 42-47.
Ibid, 58.
45
Ibid, 56-57
46
Birken, “James Primrose (1592-1600),” 2.
44
237
to the temperature of the aire, are not so venemous as those in hot countries. Therefore
Galen gives strict charge, that in composition of triacle [theriac; a poison antidote] the
vipers be not taken in Summer, when they are most venomous, for us here, nor in the
spring-time, for the Italians.47
Primrose insisted the mountebanks and charlatans used non-poisonous snakes or vipers
rendered harmless by virtue of the season. Only the gullible market patron could fail to
understand. Primrose ridiculed empirics that claimed a single remedy could cure all poisons.
Why did those not trained in medicine intuitively sense the fallacy implicit in such a concept?
How could any single medicinal formula possibly be omnipotent? If a mountebank claimed to
travel the world over in order to obtain some panacea, how could he afford to sell it for a mere
twelve pence? If his miraculous formula worked every time, why was it necessary to
demonstrate its value over and over again? Why was this merchant not ridiculously rich?48
Ignorance was to blame, for the commonfolk did not read the proper treatises of medicine and
natural philosophy.
Ignorance, wisdom and the exchange of ideas across different levels of the social
spectrum also represented common themes in the literature penned by English natural
philosopher Thomas Browne (1605-1682). Although a university-trained physician and
dedicated medical philosopher, Browne’s work transcended issues of health and healing. More
47
Ibid., 28. As discussed in previous chapters, Pietro Mattioli was something of a state physician for the Venetian
Republic. In the 1540s, Mattioli was hired to catalogue the herbals under study in the Republic’s botanical garden
housed near the university of Padua. See Mattioli, I Discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli. Mattioli published
several other books on this very same subject, both before and after the Valgrisi volume in 1557, for example, Il
Dioscoride (1550), Commentarii (1554), and I discorsi (1559). But the 1557 volume represents the most
comprehensive work on Dioscorides. Mattioli, in fact, wrote many tracts glorifying the medical philosophers of
antiquity.
48
Ibid., 26-27.
238
scholarly and less polemical than Primrose, Securis, Aldana, Mercurio, and Joubert, Browne
concerned himself with the broadest and deepest questions facing natural philosophers. But
Browne’s quest for a viable theory of knowledge essentially began and ended with medicinal
issues.
Born in London, Browne studied at Oxford, Montpellier, and Padua, before graduating
from Leiden with a medical degree in 1633. He gained membership in London’s College of
Physicians shortly thereafter.49 But Browne’s interest in higher learning drew him away from the
apothecary shops, hospitals, and sick beds to the libraries and private studies, where he wrote
prodigiously. Thomas Browne was more medical philosopher than practicing healer.
Thomas Browne’s most famous work, Religio Medici (1636), represents a mammoth
inquiry into humanity, nature, and reason. In this book, Browne established his interpretation of
properly ordered epistemology and human knowledge construction. Although trained in
mainstream Galenic/humoral theory, Browne advocated experimentation, expressed hope that
new ideas might spring from dissection and new approaches to anatomical dissection, and
sympathized with contemporary theories of chemical medicine. In short, Browne believed the art
of medicine had yet to reach its full potential.50
Thomas Browne’s basic philosophy of knowledge may be summarized as follows:
inquiry into nature leads the student to God; the exercise of judicious reason and properly
49
See Huntley, Sir Thomas Browne: A Biographical and Critical Study, and Finch, Sir Thomas Browne: A Doctor’s
Life of Science and Faith. Also see Robbins, “Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682): Physician and Author.” In this
chapter, I rely more heavily on Grell and Cunningham, eds., Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in SeventeenthCentury England, especially Cunningham’s chapter entitled “Sir Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici: Reason,
Nature and Religion.” My use of primary sources refers to two volumes written by Browne: Religio Medici (1645)
and Pseudodoxia epidemica, or, Enquiries into very many received tenents and commonly presumed truths (1659),
from the Folger Institute’s Shakespeare Library, Special Collections. Geoffrey Keynes’ The Works of Sir Thomas
Browne is still constantly cited in scholarly works focusing directly on Browne.
50
For a discussion of Browne’s relationship to chemical medicine and his consideration of Paracelsian learning, see
Debus’s “Sir Thomas Browne and the Study of Chemical Indicators,” 29-36.
239
ordered curiosity ultimately confirms faith; the physician has a responsibility to forge ahead;
guided by faith, his Christian reason will reinforce his belief while adding to practical
knowledge. These ideas may be partly captured in a poem offered by Browne in Religio Medici:
It is thy maker’s will, for unto none
But unto reason can He ere be known…
Teach my endeavors so thy works to read,
That learning them, in thee I may proceed.51
At first glance, it would seem that Thomas Browne represented little more than a
seventeenth-century version of Thomas Acquinas. Both men believed Aristotelian logic infused
with grace provided the Christian path to truth; faith buttressed reason. But whereas Acquinas
sought to qualify human reasoning by emphasizing the necessity of faith, Browne hoped to
reinvigorate logical theorizing as an intellectual activity. Thomas Browne feared the arts of
inductive and deductive reasoning had sunk into an abyss of neglect and disuse. While mindless
scribes never gained intellectual ownership of the texts they translated, the soft-minded and
mentally lazy lived by slogans and proverbs. Browne criticized the scholastics of his generation
for their habit of simply recording what they had read rather than inquiring into causes for
themselves. “Although Universities may be full of learned men,” he warned, “they are oftentimes
empty of learning.” University professors, medical philosophers, and licensed physicians—the
men most familiar to Thomas Browne—represented the primary targets of his major criticism.
For Browne, original sin, the credulous nature of imperfect man, the dominance of
51
Browne, Religio Medici,, I.1.
240
passion over reason, mental laziness, the willingness to uncritically accept authority—all
contribute to the confusion of the common man. In Religio Medici and Pseudodoxia Epidemica
(Vulgar Errors, 1646), Browne acknowledges a scholarly duty to spread proper learning and
eradicate ignorance.52 For Browne, properly ordered, legitimate knowledge flows from learned
men to the commonfolk of everyday life. “I do not address my pen or stile [stylus] to the
common people,” writes Browne, “whom books do not redress, and are this way incapable of
reduction.” Instead, Browne speaks “unto the knowing and leading part of learning, as well as
understanding.”53 According to Browne, “If the gentry can be stopped from believing their own
vulgar errors, erroneous beliefs will ‘wither of themselves,’ for the gentry will be an example to
the vulgar, and true knowledge will flow out from them.”54
But before this top-down flow of wisdom could sweep ignorance away, learned men
themselves needed intellectual cleansing. In the context of Italian natural philosophy, Browne
criticized the professional physician Girolamo Cardano, the neo-scholarly “professor of secrets”
Alessio Piemontese, and the aristocrat Giambattista Della Porta. He praised Cardano as “a great
Enquirer of Truth,” but criticized him as a “too greedy receiver of it.” For Browne, Cardano’s
intellect was characterized by superficial curiosity which lacked the rigor of properly ordered
investigation. Browne dismissed Piemontese out of hand, but wrote at length on the more famous
Giambattista Della Porta. According to Browne, Della Porta possessed certain characteristics of a
legitimate experimenter, but his Magia Naturale ultimately served to fascinate readers with
wonders and tricks, rather than enhancing their appreciation for measured experimentation.55
52
Browne, Religio Medici, “To the Reader,” ii.
Browne, Psudodoxia Epidemica, “To the Reader,” ii.
54
Cunningham, “Sir Thomas Browne and his Religio Medici,” 45.
55
Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Browne’s reflection on Della Porta is taken from Keynes, ed., The Works of Sir
Thomas Browne, vol. 2, 58-59.
53
241
If Browne thought the intellectual shortcomings of the learned and the neo-scholarly
might be reformed, he shuddered with revulsion at the ignorance of the masses. Credulous,
naïve, and lazy, the common man with his morbid ignorance marred his relationship with life
and living. Rather than investigate, the common man groped for predigested answers. Nursery
rhymes, proverbs, secrets, and tricks allowed the weak thinker to avoid the challenge of
reasoning. As Eamon points out, Browne detested how the common man fell for the deceptions
of charlatans, mountebanks, quacks, cunning women, and fortune tellers.56
“Their individual imperfections being great,” wrote Browne of the common man, “they
are moreover enlarged by their aggregation.” According to Browne, the masses of men, “being
erroneous in their single numbers, once huddled together [constituted] a farraginous concurrence
of all conditions, tempers, sexes and ages.” It seemed unavoidable, wrote Browne, that “their
determinations be monstrous, and many waies inconsistent with Truth.”57 Eamon compares
Browne’s views with Francis Bacon’s suggestion regarding a fundamental purpose of
philosophy: to convince the vulgar to forget their ungoverned appetites and to listen to reason
and obey the law.” But Bacon thought the entire affair a losing battle. In times of trouble, he
observed, “men would always return to the depraved conditions of their nature.”58
Late in Browne’s life, John Evelyn wrote him on behalf of a group of learned physicians.
Evelyn suggested forming “a society of learned and ingenuous men, such as Dr. Browne, by
whome we might hope to redeeme the tyme that has bin lost, in pursuing vulgar errours.”59 But
Browne declined. The good doctor was tired. Letters written in his final years suggest that
56
Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 265.
Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 29.
58
Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 265. See also Keynes, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, 6:722.
Eamon and Keynes discussed Bacon’s De sapientia veterum.
59
Keynes, ed., The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, 275. See also Robbins’ biographical summary, “Sir Thomas
Browne (1605-1682),” 18. Evelyn’s letter was dated 28 January, 1660.
57
242
Browne shared Francis Bacon’s doubts regarding massive intellectual reform among the
common people.60
For Thomas Browne, the great masses failed to understand man, comprehend nature, and
adequately grasp the relationship between the two. Their trivialization of the sacred arts of
medicine and healing took humanity away from the Christian path to truth. The learned
physician, who studied natural philosophy, mastered logic and understood the “microcosm”—
man himself—in the great relationship between humanity and the cosmos, had the potential to
lead mankind to the full and sacred understanding of life’s deepest questions. But ignorance
stood in the way.
Thomas Browne died on June 5, 1682. He left the crusade against ignorance to others.
But in England and on the continent, scholarly medical practitioners and amateur healers
continued to embrace different theories of knowledge. Debates between the two camps would be
more polemical and less sophisticated than inquiries envisioned by Browne. The battle lines had
been drawn before Browne’s birth and the feuds would endure long after his death.
*
*
*
*
*
British historians remember much about the reign of King Henry VIII (1509-1547). Few
emphasize, however, the endorsement Henry paid amateur healers at the expense of licensed
medical practitioners in 1534. Henry signed a statute extending legal protection to “divers honest
persons, women as well as men, whom God hath endued with knowledge of the nature, kind, and
60
I am following the line of thinking established by Frank Huntley in Sir Thomas Browne: A Biographical and
Critical Study; see especially 134-37. Patrides, ed., Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works contains an important
discussion of Browne’s letters. See “Letter to a Friend,” 392-395. In Keynes’ The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, an
important letter from Browne to his son Edward, dated 14 June 1676, is printed and discussed; see vol. 4, 61.
243
operation of certain herbs, roots, and waters, and the using and administration of them to such as
being pained with customable diseases.”61 Anyone could attempt to cure the ill; healing required
no license.
Evaluating the King’s motives for issuing this proclamation can be tricky. Henry’s
interest in breaking the political power of organized physicians may have outweighed his
concern for the health and well-being of his ordinary subjects.62 But we may conclude that the
king’s ideas enjoyed some form of popular currency. Why would such thoughts have occurred
only to Henry? How could the king have suggested that those subjects lacking formal medical
education could conceivably cure the sick as well as professional healers if no one else had
reason to believe such a thing? In early sixteenth-century England, according to Clifford D.
Connor, “the lowly empiricks and folk healers were widely perceived as being at least as
therapeutically effective as the elite physicians.”63 Several decades after Henry’s death, the
natural philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote, “I would rather have the advice or take physick from
an experienced old woman that had been at many sick people’s bedsides than from the learnedest
but unexperienced physician.”64 Discussing early modern English healers, Roy Porter writes:
Empirics were accused of being know-nothings. True, some would respond, they
had not a university education. But who would want one? Were not the lecturers
of the schools all tinkling theory and vacuous verbiage? They [amateurs] had
instead graduated from the University of Life, gaining vastly valuable practical
61
Henry, “Doctors and Healers: Popular Culture and the Medical Profession,” 197-198.
Roberts, “The Personnel and Practice of Medicine in Tudor and Stuart England,” in Medical History 6 (1962),
363-382, and 8 (1964), 217-234. See also Mackie, The Earlier Tudors 1485-1558, especially chap. 16, 562-603.
63
Conner, A People’s History of Science, 310.
64
Quoted from Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 282-283.
62
244
experience.
65
Entire tomes of English medical history have been filled with similar testimony from
statesmen, famous intellectuals, and ordinary citizens of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.66
Much of the criticism of official medicine came from neo-scholarly practitioners, or
healers on the margins of academic medicine. For an example, let us consider the case of John
Symcotts, an unorthodox London physician, who practiced in the first half of the seventeenth
century. Although a university-trained and fully licensed physician, Symcotts’ sympathy for
vernacular healing methods and unorthodox medical treatment had stained his reputation among
his professional colleagues. In 1648, Symcotts treated the son of the Earl of Bridgewater, who
may have suffered a stroke. Symcotts tried to blow tobacco and sneezing powder up the victim’s
nostrils, inserted mustard and vinegar in his mouth, attached dead pigeons to his feet, held a hot
frying pan to his head, and applied leeches to his rectum. The patient died. But Symcotts’ faith in
vernacular healing methods and his suspicion of orthodox medicine survived.67
Thirteen years earlier, when Symcotts himself suffered from gout, his brother, a London
merchant, wrote to suggest that he try a treatment popular downtown. The remedy consisted of a
65
Porter, Quacks, Fakers & Charlatans in Medicine, 268-269.
See Porter, Quacks, Fakers & Charlatans in Medicine, as well as Health for Sale: Quackery in England and
“Quacks and Doctors: One Man’s Herb, Another Man’s Medicine,” 14-16. See also Pollock, With Faith and Physic,
and Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London. In addition, see Thomas, Religion and the
Decline of Magic, especially chapters 7 and 8. Margaret Pelling’s Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London is
closely related to the discussion advanced in this chapter. But my analysis differs significantly from the one issued
by Pelling. As described below, I think Pelling’s habit of dividing early modern medical practitioners into binary
oppositional camps of “regulars” and “irregulars” does more harm than good for investigations into Renaissance
medicine. Although Pelling’s work is not without value, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London does represent
the type of historical reconstruction I take issue with in this chapter. See also Harkness, The Jewel House, especially
chap. 3, “The Contest over Medical Authority: Valentin Russwurin and the Barber-Surgeons.”
67
Poynter and Bishop, eds., A Seventeenth-Century Doctor and His Patients, 96-97; see also 187-188.
66
245
paste made from yeast, egg white, and alum, spread on brown paper and bound about the foot.
As Doreen Nagy suggests, “It [this case] represents an excellent example of how contemporary
lay people perceived the limited capacity of the medical profession, even to the extent of their
inability to treat themselves efficiently.”68
Eight years later, George Starkey, an English medical student, issued a scathing attack on
orthodox healing. Like all university students of his generation, Starkey began his medical
studies within the tradition of Hippocratic/Galenic humoral theory. But toward the end of his
education, Starkey moved toward Paracelsian schools of chemical medicine. Starkey’s critique
of medical epistemology contained an interesting ideological twist. In 1656, Starkey wrote:
Whatever they [Galenists] have done that may be right or do good, they have it
from the accidental experiments of old wives, and good folks, who have found
or known much good done by this or that Herb or Simple or other thing…then
when Doctors after had drawn it into Receipts.69
Starkey also emphasized how people living in areas that featured no professional
physicians often cured their own illnesses. “The poor,” wrote Starkey, “who could not afford a
physitian, often cured themselves by simple methods and with less risk than if a regular [doctor]
was involved.”70 “Thus Starkey established the legitimacy of popular medicine,” wrote Doreen
68
Nagy, Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England, 45.
Starkey, Nature’s Explication and Helmont’s Vindication, on page 25 of my copy consulted from the Folger
Institute’s Shakespeare Library. Many thanks to Professor Rebecca Totaro for making me aware of this text and the
relevance of Starkey’s testimony to this chapter. See also Newman, “Ghennical Fire: The Lives of George Starkey,”
758-760. In addition, Nagy’s Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England, 49-52, offers a brief discussion of
Starkey.
70
Starkey, Nature’s Explication and Helmont’s Vindication, found on page 226 of my copy consulted from the
Folger Institute’s Shakespeare Library.
69
246
71
Nagy, “vis-a-vis Galenical or profession medicine.”
One year earlier, Cambridge-trained physician Nicholas Culpeper published The English
Physitian Enlarged.72 Culpeper is best remembered as a vocal critic of scholarly seventeenthcentury English medicine.73 But his career as a writer and medical philosopher contained some
twists as interesting as the unorthodox medicinal recipes he advocated late in life. Born of a
wealthy family, Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654) grew up in London, surrounded by tutors,
teachers, and educational instructors. As a youth, Culpeper took a serious interest in “astrology
and occult philosophy.”74 Shortly after his sixteenth birthday, Culpeper enrolled in Cambridge
University, where he eventually completed a medical degree. Culpeper soon began to
concentrate on writing. Shortly after his death, Culpeper’s widow claims her late husband left
behind “seventy-nine books.”75 According to Poynter, “Culpeper’s earliest writings faithfully
reflect the orthodox medicine of his time, and his translations of the leading medical writers of
his age gave English doctors for the first time a comprehensive body of medical literature in their
own tongue which represented the best contemporary authorities.”76 But somewhere along the
line, Culpeper’s attitude towards official medicine changed.
By his twenty-fifth birthday, Culpepper had become a staunch critic of official medicine.
He wrote self-help medical books to make healing remedies and formulas available to the widest
71
Nagy, Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England, 50.
he complete title was The English Physitian Enlarged, Being an Astrologo-Physical Discourse of the Vulgar
Herbs of this Nation, Containing a Compleat Method of Physick, whereby a man may preserve his Body in Health;
or Cure himself, being Sick, for three pence Charge, with such things only as grown in England, they being most fit
for English Bodies, by Nicholas Culpepper. This volume resides in the Folger Institute’s Shakespeare Library.
73
See Thulesis, Nicholas Culpeper, English Physician and Astronomer. See also Poynter, “Nicholas Culpeper and
the Paracelsians,” 1.201-20, and “Nicholas Culpeper and His Books.”
74
Curry, “Culpepper, Nicholas (1616-1654), Physician and Astrologer,” in Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezacess.libraries.psu.edu/view/printable/6882. Curry quotes Culpepper’s
contemporary, C. Ryves from “The Life of the Admired Physician and Astrologer of Our Times, Mr. Nicholas
Culpeper,” in Culpeper’s 1659 School of Physick, fol. C3r.
75
Poynter, “Nicholas Culpeper and His Books,” 160.
76
Ibid., 153.
72 T
247
possible audience. In the introductions of such books, Culpepper directed his wrath at universitytrained physicians. “What an insufferable injury it is,” wrote Culpeper in The English Physitian
Enlarged, “that in a free Common-wealth, men and women should be trained up in such
Ignorance, that when they are sick, and have Herbs in their Garden conducing to their cure, they
are so hood-winked that they know not their vertues.” For Culpeper, “most of the [learned]
physitian’s covetousness outweighs his wits as much as a Millstone out-weighs a Feather.”77 In
speaking of the most well-known medical institution of his day, Culpeper wrote, “the College of
Physitians, out of their great learning, care for the publicke only so far as their own gain be
conceryned.”78 Patrick Curry suggests, “Culpeper criticized the self-interest of the college
physicians throughout his career, whom he once classed with priests and lawyers: ‘The one
deceives men in matters belonging to their soul, the other in matters belonging to their bodies,
and the third in matter belonging to their estates.’”79
Culpeper believed in herbal medicine and remained convinced that proper healing
necessitated consulting the sky’s heavenly bodies. Many at university shared such views, but
Culpeper dismissed the academics out of hand. Scholarly types proceeded from Galenic and
Hippocratic teaching; Culpeper left such misguided illogic behind in his youth. Besides, for
Culpeper, most university-educated medical practitioners abused the art of healing. The College
of Physicians worked more earnestly at marginalizing their main commercial competition than
they did at treating the poor.
Nor were early modern clashes between different groups of healers unique to England,
77
Cited from Mary E. Fissell’s soon-to-be published article, “When Is a Book Not a Book? When It Is a Mirror, or a
Closet, or a Jewel.” Professor Fissell quotes Culpeper from The English Physitian Enlarged, fol. 34.
78
Quoted from my version (from the Folger Institute’s Shakespeare Library) of The English Physition Enlarged, fol.
18v.
79
Cited in Curry, “Culpepper, Nicholas (1616-1654), Physician and Astrologer,” in Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, www.oxforddnb.com, on page 4 of 7. Curry refers to Culpeper’s 1949 volume, A Physical Directory; see
“To the Reader.”
248
France, and Italy. In 1547 the University of Marburg professor Johannes Dryander (1500-1560)
landed a blow for trained physicians at the expense of amateur healers within Germany.
Imploring readers to stay away from “inexperienced mountebanks, foolish old women, Jews and
ignorant monks,” Dryander insisted that only university-trained physicians actually cured illness:
Such bums and swindlers have a drug, potion, remedy or secret, or some other crazy
thing for every ailment, so that many lives are lost because of them. Saying this, I do
not mean to dismiss the experimentatores, or the experienced physicians, or those that
use science….But wherever you can find a pious, God fearing, experienced, learned
physician, as one who owes his position to some authority certified by the community,
him you may completely trust to cure any illness, and thus you may have, and not
forsake, God’s means in a physician and in the art of medicine.80
In fact, the early modern actor best remembered for this type of controversy hailed from
Switzerland and spent much of his career in the later German empire. Theophrastus Bombastus
von Hohenheim’s critique of sixteenth-century learned European medicine warrants much
attention. But Paracelsus (1493-1541) has been discussed at length in Chapter 3; only a brief
description of his aversion to university medicine shall be appropriate here. We may recall St.
John’s Day 1527, in Basle, when Paracelsus participated in a celebration in the city’s largest
marketplace. According to local tradition, residents of Basle built a large bonfire on this day each
year, with effigies of unpopular figures serving as fodder for the flames. But this particular year,
Paracelsus, accompanied by many university medical students, used the bonfire to forge a
80
Dryander, Artzenei Spiegel gemeyner Inhalt derselbigen, iii. My copy comes from Harvard’s Widener Library.
But see also Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 99-109, especially 103.
249
different type of statement. On June 24, 1527, Paracelsus allegedly tossed the great Summa of
Avicenna, the collected writings of one of official medicine’s most respected authors, into the
bonfire, so that, as he remarked, “all that misery might go up into the air with smoke.”81
Paracelsus’s disdain for official medicine is underscored by an address he delivered to a
college crowd later that summer:
Of all the disciplines medicine alone, through the grace of God and according to the
opinion of authors divine and profane, is recognized as a sacred art. Yet few doctors
today practise it with success. Therefore, the time has come to bring medicine back to
its former dignity, to cleanse it from the leaven of the barbarians, and to purge their
errors. We shall never do so by strictly adhering to the rules of the ancients. Instead, we
must exclusively study nature and use the experience which we have gained in long
years of practice. Who does not know that most contemporary doctors fail because they
slavishly abide by the precepts of Avicenna, Galen, and Hippocrates, as though these
were Apollo’s oracles from which it is not allowed to digress by a finger’s breath. If it
pleases God, this way may lead to splendid titles, but does not make a true doctor. What
a doctor needs is not eloquence or knowledge of language and of books, illustrious
though they may be, but profound knowledge of Nature and her works.82
81
Most secondary literature treats the event as a matter of fact, but the record remains controversial. See Paracelsus’
1565 Paragranum, 34. Also see Pachter, Paracelsus: Magic Into Science, 158-159, and Ball, The Devil’s Doctor,
196. Nevertheless, whether literally true or not, Paracelsus claimed, in print, to have burned Avicenna’s writings for
the sake of expressing his disdain for institutionalized teaching. Of Paracelsus’s distrust of sixteenth-century
university medicine’s use of ancient sources, there can be no doubt. See Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to
Philosophical Medicine and Webster, “Paracelsus and Demons,” as well as Webster, “Alchemical and Paracelsian
Medicine” in Health, Medicine and Mortality, 301-333.
82
Quoted from Pachter, Paracelsus, Magic Into Science, 152-153. The address seems to have been delivered on
June 5, 1527.
250
After raising a few eyebrows and drawing a few gasps, Paracelsus stated his case more
succinctly. The Swiss physician described what students might expect from his course:
I shall explain the textbooks which I have written on surgery and pathology, as an
introduction to my healing methods. I do not compile them from excerpts of
Hippocrates or Galen. In ceaseless toil I created them anew upon the foundation of
experience, the supreme teacher of all things. If I want to prove anything I shall not do
so by quoting authorities, but by experiment and by reasoning thereupon. To express
myself more plainly, let me say here that I do not believe in the ancient doctrine of
complexions and humours which has been falsely supposed to account for all diseases.
It is because of these doctrines that so few physicians have correct views of disease, its
origins and its course. I bid you, do not pass a premature judgement on Theophrastus
until you have heard him. Farewell, and come with a good will to study our attempt to
reform medicine.83
The Paracelsian appeal to nature and experience became a common structure of criticism
among foes of early modern learned medicine. Boiled down to its constitutive components, the
argument went something like this: scholarly medical practitioners studied books and memorized
purely theoretical ideas; authentic healers concerned themselves with the only true source of
remedies, mother earth. Experimenting with the physical world and collecting the secrets of
nature, vernacular healers represented the art of medicine’s best practitioners. In one form or
another, renegade university professors, neo-scholarly medical authors, self-styled empirics, and
83
Ibid., 153.
251
untrained folkloric healers all made use of this argument.
Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, the German-born natural philosopher, magician,
astrologer, and alchemist, advanced such ideas himself. Formally educated, Agrippa (1486-1535)
worked in Germany, France, and Italy. He taught natural philosophy at the University of Dole in
France and served the court of Maximilian I in Italy, working as a theologian, physician, legal
expert, and soldier.84 But in his 1528 De incertitudine et vanitate scientarium omnium et atrium,
Agrippa issued a thorough critique of scholarly medicine.
According to Agrippa, the disharmony and lack of agreement among medical professors
revealed the poor state of scholarly medicine. “While Hippocrates refers the cause of disease to
the pneuma,” von Nettesheim observed, “Herophillus attributes the cause of disease to the
humours, Erasistratus to the arterial blood, Asclepiades to the pores and Diocles to the inequality
of the elements composing the body.”85 Sixteenth-century medical philosophers, complained
Agrippa, only added to the confusion with controversial interpretations of the ancient works they
84
Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim’s 1531 book De occulta philosophia libri tres remains one of the most widely
discussed works of early modern natural philosophy. Agrippa’s ideas may be broadly described as follows: he
proposed a form of “natural magic” that could resolve all contemporary epistemological problems which ultimately
served to validate the Christian faith. For Agrippa, learned natural philosophers could manipulate the forces of
nature to achieve solutions to basic problems via a proper understanding of God’s universe. Agrippa suggested that
the natural world was fundamentally linked to the celestial and the divine. Three basic types of magic were
understood to exist during Agrippa’s lifetime: “natural magic,” in which the practitioner exploited the occult
properties of the elemental world, “celestial magic,” which involved the influence of the stars and heavenly bodies,
and “ceremonial magic,” which involved an appeal for aid to spiritual beings. Agrippa tried to synthesize all three
through systematic study, proposing a new learned art of magic in the process. See Three Books of Occult
Philosophy. See also Shumaker, Natural Magic and Modern Science. Nauert’s Agrippa and the Crisis of
Renaissance Thought offers a solid biography on Agrippa with cogent analysis of his major works, Also see Pagel,
Religion and Neoplatonism in Renaissance Medicine; van der Poel, Cornelius Agrippa: The Humanist Theologian;
and Lehrich, The Language of Demons and Angels. The former book resides more comfortably in traditional
histories of early modern natural philosophy while the latter volume more closely resembles modern histories of
science, which generally prefer to raise questions rather than provide answers about Renaissance epistemology.
85
For these quotations, I have used von Nettesheim, Della vanita delle scienze, of the vanitie and vuncertaintie of
artes and sciences (1569). This is a translation published forty-one years after the original version of the book
appeared. See fol. 138r. Agrippa’s De incertitudine et vanitate scientarium omnium et artium was published in Latin
in 1528 and translated into Italian, English, and French shortly thereafter. See Pagel, Religion and Neoplatonism in
Renaissance Medicine, especially 121-123. Maclean’s Logic, Signs and Nature also puts forth a discussion of von
Nettesheim relevant to my paragraph above; see 94-95. Professor Maclean relies upon Pagel’s 1985 translation.
252
so mysteriously revered. “Aesculapius himself was a rogue,” attacked Agrippa, referring to the
ancient medical author as “the offspring of an incestuous marriage.” Von Nettesheim dismissed
learned physicians as “the greatest criminals, the most quarrelsome, envious, and deceitful of
men.” According to Agrippa, “they [scholarly medical practitioners] are always dirty, because
for the sake of gain they roam around privies and their homes are the filth of men….Cato rightly
forbade all physicians to enter Rome.”86
Like Joubert, Mercurio, Securis, Primrose, and others described above, Agrippa
suggested that “patients frequently suffer more from the physician and his remedy than from the
disease itself,” except von Nettesheim pointed the accusatory finger at learned practitioners
rather than self-styled empirics.87 In a passage worth quoting at length, von Nettesheim wrote:
The physician observes the patient with gravity, inspects the urine, feels the pulse,
examines tongue and chest, tests the excretions, asks questions concerning diet and
other intimate details, as though, by such means, he could weigh the elements and the
humours of the body and bring them into the equilibrium. Then, with great solemnity,
he prescribes the medicine. Mild illness he protracts as long as possible, suggesting
ridiculous measures which will be agreeable to the patient, such as water dripping into a
basin as a cure for insomnia. If the illness is severe and the outlook doubtful or
hopeless, he prescribes a special routine, orders unusual things, forbidding the usual,
finds fault with whatever has been given to the patient, threatens death, promises life,
and demands a higher fee. If death occurs, it is the result of a pulmonary oedema or
some other incurable condition, or no doubt, is due to the disobedience of the patient or
86
87
Ibid., fols. 138r-139v.
Ibid., fol. 138r.
253
the carelessness of the nurses, or it may even be a colleague or apothecary who is
responsible.88
Could any physician or healer be trusted? Agrippa divided medical practitioners into
three camps: (1) the “very learned, who lose all their patients,” (2) “the illiterate, who often cure
them,” and (3) “a third class whose rich patients alone recover, while peasants and common
people suffer greatly.”89 According to von Nettesheim, while “the licensed physician acquires his
remedies from books, the ‘old wife’ searches nature for plants, learning their shapes, tastes,
colors, odors and such, and according to her experience of their virtues, administers sure
remedies free of charge to anyone.”90
Other scholarly natural philosophers raised similar questions about the textually based
learning of early modern university, even if most used more discretion than Agrippa. Ambroise
Paré (1510-1590), the official surgeon to four French kings, also favored empirically derived
knowledge and practical experience over bookish learning. Considered by some to be the “Father
of Surgery,” Paré emerged as the sixteenth-century authority on the treatment of wounds in much
of Europe. He also worked as an anatomist, invented surgical instruments, and became an
important figure in obstetrics. But for all his time spent in the classroom, Paré doubted the
effectiveness of university pedagogy for practical questions facing healers. In 1572, France’s
official royal surgeon wrote:
Being at Turin, I found a surgeon who had fame above all others for the curing of
88
For this translation I have relied upon Pagel, 122.
Ibid., 123.
90
Von Nettesheim, Della vanita delle scienze, fol. 138r.
89
254
wounds of gunshot, into whose favour I found means to insinuate myself, to have
receipt of his balm, as he called it, wherewith he dressed wounds of that kind; and he
held me off the space of two years before I could possibly draw the receipt from him. In
the end by gifts and presents he gave it to me, which was this, to boil young whelps,
new pupped, in oil of lilies, with earthworms prepared with turpentine of Venice. Then
I was joyful and my heart made glad, that I had understood his remedy, which was like
to that which I had obtained by great chance. See then, dear reader, how I have learned
to dress wounds made with gunshot. Not by books.91
The Dutch-born, university-trained physician Levinus Lemnius also expressed grave
doubts about orthodox medicine and the traditional styles of education featured in European
medical schools. Lemnius (1505-1568) graduated from the University of Padua with a degree in
medicine in 1525. Over the next forty years, he traveled widely, practicing medicine and
publishing philosophical treatises in a wide range of European languages.92
De Miraculis occultis naturae (1559) represents Lemnius’s most significant work. The
book features a general discussion of natural philosophy with a strong emphasis on biology. But
sickness, health, and healing constitute a major component of all Lemnius’s literature, and this
volume contains an extensive discussion of disease, remedies, and cures. Lemnius describes a
major section as “Fit for the use of those that practise Physick, and all Others that desire to
search into the Hidden Secrets of Nature, for increase of Knowledge.” In these chapters,
Lemnius provides dozens of annotated remedies, formulas and general suggestions for curing
91
Paré, The method of curing wounds made by gun-shot, fol. 50. This volume represents a translation of Paré’s
Methode de traiter les playes faictes par hacquebutes et aultres bastons a feu, which was originally published in
Paris in 1572. Also see Carbonnier, A Barber-Surgeon: A Life of Ambroise Paré.
92
For some basic information on Lemnius, see Fissell, Vernacular Bodies, The Politics of Reproduction, 198-211.
255
common sixteenth-century illnesses.
93
In 1572, a group of Lemnius’s students posthumously published his unfinished work De
habitu et constitutione corporis (translated into English as “Touchstones of Complexions”). Like
De Miraculis occultis naturae, this volume can be described as a “how-to guide” of self-help
medicine, residing squarely in the “books of secrets tradition” that so greatly disturbed the
Augustinian monk Tommaso Garzoni.
Lemnius generally writes within a Hippocratic/Galenic medical framework. Indeed, De
Miraculis occultis naturae unfolds against a backdrop of humoural theory. Lemnius advances the
Galenic emphasis on moderation in sleeping, eating, and exercise. He views witchcraft and the
supernatural with conservative suspicion, insisting upon entirely “natural explanations” for
physical phenomena within the human body and the corresponding universe. “Humours, not
devils, cause diseases,” writes Lemnius in the second book of De Miraculis occultis naturae.94 A
few paragraphs later, Lemnius explains that while “mad people may seem to speak in tongues,
this hardly means they are possessed by Satan,” suggesting that physical problems often cause
slurred speech and irrational talk.”95 The fourth book contains a discussion of the moon’s force
and effects on tides typical of the astrological medicine taught in early modern universities.
But Lemnius’ work fundamentally differs from most scholarly early modern medical
writing. Unlike other physicians, Lemnius emphasizes the significance of experience over reason
in the derivation of healing practices. As Lemnius writes:
93
Lemnius De Miraculis occultis naturae, Libri I, II, III, IV, item, de vita cum animi et corporis incolumitate recte
instituenda liber unus; illi quidem iam postremum emendati & aliquot capitibus aucti, hic vero numquam antehac
editus…,published in Antwerp in 1564. I have consulted an English version published in 1658 entitled The Secret
Miracles of Nature in Four Books, Written by that Famous Physitian Levinus Lemnius, from the Folger Institute’s
Shakespeare Library.
94
Ibid.; see bk. 2, 86, for the quote about humours, devils, and disease. See bk. 1, 44:364-371, for specific
discussion of moderation with regards to regimens of health, and 58:385-390, for discussion of witchcraft and the
possibility of demonic magic.
95
Ibid., bk. 1, 2:91.
256
There are two Instruments of Art which are serviceable to the profit and use of men:
Reason and Experience, by which all things are wont to be confirmed and established.
For by these, Physick itself, and other Sciences, for the most part, besides Mathematical
Arts, are supported. But such things as are to gain credit with men of an exact and
searching judgment, ought to be proved by the Line, year, to be examined by the
Touch-Stone. But what great thing can a Physitian undertake, if he endeavoureth by
Reason to convince, that herbs and Medicaments have strong effects, unless he could
prove it by Experience?96
Lemnius does not concern himself with the subtleties and nuances of reason discussed by
Thomas Browne. Instead, like Laurent Joubert and Scipione Mercurio, Lemnius seems to
perceive reason and experience as two distinct, separate activities that must work in conjunction
to form knowledge. But unlike Joubert and Mercurio, Lemnius argues for the primacy of
empiricism over rational thought. Reversing scholastic philosophy’s ordering of the relationship
between reason and experience—the traditional view that argued for the primacy of reason—
Lemnius suggested that experience represented the most significant component in human
knowledge construction. For Lemnius, reason constituted an intellectual activity which helped
make sense of experience. But to truly “know,” a human being had to see, hear, smell, touch,
observe, and participate.
Like most natural philosophers, Lemnius believed unseen, inaudible, hidden forces
resided within the physical world, beyond the human capacity for sense perception. But for the
96
Ibid., cited from “The Preface to the Reader” of Book 1. The folio is listed as A3, Lib.6.c.34, but pagination may
vary. The text cited above is drawn from the first and second pages of the book.
257
purposes of healing, Lemnius did not concern himself with abstract or complex theoretical
questions regarding such things. For Lemnius, healers should not be expected to master or
explain the ‘reasons’ and ‘causes’ of hidden forces within nature. What would be the point of
such conjecture anyway? With an assault on Christianized Aristotelian logic, Lemnius implies
that it is unnecessary to understand the reason, essence or cause of some quality or dynamic in
nature to reap the medicinal benefits of the matter in question:
There are many hidden and secret things in nature; things whose effects are unknown; it
would be indiscreet to declare the reason and the cause of the effect of such things.
Such things may seem destitute of reason and we may be bereft of the knowledge of
their causes; but this may not prevent a manifest demonstration of the sense and
understanding of such things; Physitians may call such things “hidden qualities.” I
might stir up the minds of the learned to search out demonstrations and causes of such
things in nature; I will, to the utmost of my power, endeavor to draw out the reason, by
a probable and artificial conjecture, or as near as I can be leveling to hit the mark. Yea,
I confess, there are many things in nature of an unknown original.97
Lemnius rejected scholastic styles of deriving truth and knowledge with regards to
questions facing the medical practitioner; indeed, he did not appreciate the necessity and
relevance of such intellectual activity to healing. Hence, as a natural philosopher practicing
medicine, or, more precisely, as a medical philosopher, Lemnius’s theory of knowledge and view
of nature contrasted with the medical education taught at university.
97
Ibid., cited from “The Preface to the Reader” of Book 1. The text above is drawn from the second page of the
book.
258
University dropouts tended to frame the argument more strongly. Consider the ringing
endorsement vernacular healers received from Peter Severinus in 1535. A former medical
student who quit school prior to graduation, Severinus urged natural philosophers:
[S]ell your lands, burn up your books, buy yourself stout shoes, travel to the mountains,
search the valleys, the deserts, the shores of the sea, and the deepest depressions of the
earth….Be not ashamed to study the astronomy and terrestrial philosophy of the
peasantry. Purchase coal, build furnaces, watch and operate the fire. In this way and
only this way you will arrive at a knowledge of things and their properties.98
The idea of the simple peasant enjoying a fundamental advantage over the trained
physician enjoyed currency throughout sixteenth-century Europe. In France, the famous jurist
René Choppin remarked in 1575, “How many savants in medicine have been outdone by a
simple peasant woman who, with a single plant or herb, has found a remedy for illnesses
despaired of by physicians?”99 As a French barrister defending a woman accused of
charlatanism, Choppin conveniently deployed a fairly popular idea for the sake of winning a
single case. For the Danish Peter Servinus, a self-proclaimed “Paracelsian,” the superiority of
vernacular healing constituted the central philosophical principle of his life.
Again, inspiration for such ideas existed at the very top of sixteenth-century French
society. Bourbon king Henry IV (1553-1610) maintained an interest in alternative medicine
throughout his life, keeping several Paracelsians in his personal medical entourage. Basle
98
Severinus, Peter, Idea medicinae philosophicae, quoted in Debus, English Paracelsians, 20. See also Eamon,
Science and the Secrets of Nature, 161-162.
99
Quoted from Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 261n.
259
graduate Joseph Duchesne ranked among the King’s alternative medical philosophers. The
subversive tendencies of Henry IV’s doctor emerge clearly in his most famous work:
If Hypocrates or Galen himself, were now againe alive, they would exceedingly reioyce
to see our art so inlarged & augmented by so great and noble addition, and would
patronize and upholde with their own hands, that which was hidden from the old fathers
in former ages: and rejecting many of those things, which before pleased them,
yeelding to reason & experience, would gladly embrace the new.100
Indeed, the significance of reason, essence, and causes, as framed within the scholastic
tradition, came under fire from a wide variety of healers during the late Renaissance. Men like
Paracelsus, as explained in the previous chapter, believed that nature and the physical world
represented a giant playground which man needed to systematically observe, study, and test in
order to derive practical solutions to human problems. The forests, valleys, streams, and
meadows, not the libraries, constituted the proper theater of human inquiry. Remedies could not
be derived by logical deduction, but by experience. Who cared about the “origins” or “causes” of
things? Of what value was theoretical “proof”? Curing illness involved trials and tribulations to
determine what actually works on human bodies, not linguistic debate and semantic jostling to
determine which human beings argue best. Again, many vernacular healers rejected scholastic
philosophy as the ultimate arbiter of truth regarding questions facing the medical practitioner by
100
This text is taken from the English translation of Duchesne’s Ad veritatem Hermeticae medicinae ex Hippocratis
veterumque decretis, published in Paris in 1604. The English translation, The Practise of Chymicall, and Hermetical
Physicke, for the Preservation of Health, was written by Thomas Tymme and published in London in 1605. For the
passage in Tymme’s volume, see fol. B4v. See also Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern
France, 126, for a discussion of this matter, although they appear to have consulted a different version of the
Tymme’s volume than the one I have used.
260
questioning the necessity and relevance of such intellectual activity to healing.
For the best examples we must return to northern Italy.
*
*
*
*
*
Much has been written about the sixteenth-century healer Leonardo Fioravanti, both in
this dissertation and the larger field of European medical history. Nevertheless, no investigation
of the feuds between scholarly medical practitioners and self-styled healers during the
Renaissance would be complete without a discussion of this enigmatic Bolognesan. Fioravanti
(1517-1588) studied, practiced, and wrote about medicine and healing. In fact, Leonardo
Fioravanti advised princes on medical matters, pressed lawsuits against medical institutions, and
served prison sentences for malpractice. He also performed surgery, patented remedies, wrote
eight major books, and published dozens of medical pamphlets. Fioravanti studied alchemy,
practiced distillation, served in foreign armies, and performed in distant courts, winning fame,
respect, and admiration from some while provoking hatred, scorn, and ridicule from others.
Throughout his life, he remained a vociferous critic of scholarly European medicine.101
Leonardo Fioravanti claimed to have graduated from the University of Bologna with a
101
Giordano, Leonardo Fioravanti Bolognese. See also Gentili, “Leonardo Fioravanti Bolognese alla luce di ignorati
documenti,” 16-41, and Latronico, “Leonardo Fioravanti Bolognese era un ciarlatano?,” 162-167. The most valuable
modern work is Camporesi’s Camminare il mondo: vita e avventure di Leonardo Fioravanti. Camporesi also deals
extensively with Fioravanti in La miniera del mondo, artieri, inventori impostori, especially “Parte Prima, Il
Maestro di tutte le arti (Leonardo Fioravanti).” Also see Zanier, “La Medicina paracelsiana in Italia,” 627-53. In the
English-speaking world, the best work has come from William Eamon. See “Science and Popular Culture in
Sixteenth-Century Italy;” “Alchemy in Popular Culture;” and “With the Rules of Life and an Enema,” as well as
Science and the Secrets of Nature, especially chap. 5, “Leonardo Fioravanti, Vendor of Secrets,” 168-193. But the
best sources to consult are the books Fioravanti wrote himself. They are all available in Venice’s Biblioteca
Marciana. A general discussion follows below. Fioravanti’s autobiography, entitled Tesoro della vita humana,
provides the richest description of his life and the sum total of his major experiences, while Della fisica
dell’ecellente dottore Leonardo Fioravanti provides the most systematic account of Fioravanti’s medical
philosophy.
261
doctorate in medicine. But no such record exists at the school. In 1567, some Venetian
physicians and apothecaries tried to prohibit Fioravanti from practicing medicine and selling his
patented remedies. These men charged Fioravanti with operating without a license or a medical
degree. Fioravanti requested documentation from the University of Bologna and a hearing
ensued. The University issued Fioravanti a doctorate.102 But the controversy did not end there.
Five years later he found himself challenged by a group of licensed physicians in Milan.
The Milanese doctors charged Fioravanti with “failure to medicate in the canonical way, as we
do.” Fioravanti ended up in prison for malpractice. Writing years later, Fioravanti suggested the
reason for his incarceration stemmed from the legal medical community’s fear of competition.
The eccentric healer claimed to challenge the “professional physicians” of Milan with a concrete
proposal: let them treat twenty or twenty-five sick patients while he treated the same number of
similarly ill people; if Fioravanti could not cure his patients more quickly and efficiently than his
professional competitors, he would leave the city forever. No record of any response, if such a
proposal was ever really made, exists. Fioravanti gained his freedom shortly afterwards.103
Leonardo Fioravanti’s literary war on official medicine began with his earliest
publications. Fioravanti directed a two-pronged attack: he questioned the intellectual authority of
the ancients, and he dismissed modern university professors who institutionalized the old
learning and politicized healing during the sixteenth century. “I say we must throw out the
methods, techniques and teachings of the ancients,” wrote Fioravanti in 1565.104 The daring
healer directed particular suspicion at the Aristotelian analysis of “cause” and “effect” and the
102
Fioravanti, Tesoro della vita humana, fol. 83r.
See Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 179.
104
Fioravanti, Del regimento della peste, fol. 117v. In the pages below, I hope to demonstrate that Fioravanti,
whether he realized it or not, accepted much of ancient medical learning. But, for now, let us continue with his
critique of official medicine.
103
262
subsequent emphasis on rationalization derived from “first principles,” that characterized so
much of later western medicine.
The physicians [university] insist that the empirics do not know the cause of an
infirmity. But I have never seen any doctor really treat a cause. I have medicated and
have seen others medicate the disease, which is the effect. The cause is always first, the
effect follows after. As the cause is never cured, but only the effect is, why should you
have to know about the cause when it is never cured? To treat a wound you have to
know what is important to the wound, not why the man was wounded.105
For Fioravanti, the highly intellectualized, theoretical disputes of philosophers and
logicians contributed nothing to the true art of healing. The university professor’s insidious
attempt to substitute trivializing, academic word-playing for empirically derived knowledge
aborted medical progress. Only experience, trial and error, time-tested solutions, and rigorous
attempts to catalogue valuable ideas could improve the art of medicine. “I put more belief in a
little experience,” wrote Fioravanti in 1561, “than in all the theories of the world put together.”106
Fully understanding Fioravanti’s position requires analyzing his use of the word
“experience.” By experience, the self-styled empiric seems to have meant two main things: (a)
extensive travel, collecting, surveying, chronicling and gleaning the ideas, methods, and
techniques of anyone and everyone who manipulated the elements of the physical world in order
105
Fioravanti, De’ capricci medicinali, fol. 34r. Fioravanti’s remark “Se uno sara ferito, bisogna saper di che
importanzia sia la ferita e non la cause perche e’ stato ferito,” has emerged as an oft-quoted statement in social and
cultural histories of medicine. In my view, Fioravanti’s grasp of Aristotelian philosophy exceeded the overly
simplistic logic displayed in his coy remarks about the wounded man.
106
Ibid., fol. 32v.
263
to find solutions to practical problems, and (b) systematically observing, recording, studying and
testing nature for the hidden secrets bound within the earth and the cosmos. For Fioravanti, cures
for illness resided within the physical world and the earth’s properties. But healers had yet to
adequately observe nature and study the physical world. Learned physicians studied books,
analyzed riddles, and wrestled with linguistically determined logic games. Their futile efforts
held no potential to improve the art of medicine. They looked in the wrong places.
With this anti-modern, primitivist disposition and aversion to academic study, Fioravanti
looked to the most basic human endeavors for solutions to medical problems. The shepherds who
cared for animals, the farmers who planted seeds, the wet nurses who nurtured children—these
were the people best qualified to develop practical solutions to basic human challenges, for they
proceeded from experience. “I have witnessed very many peasants, artisans, citizens and other
normal men, who without ever gaining even the slightest knowledge of medical methodology
have uncovered many pretty secrets and experiences in medicine and have had many experiences
with different sorts of infirmities,” wrote Fioravanti in 1561.107 These people prospered, argued
Fioravanti, precisely because they were not constrained by theory. Instead, they were guided by
experience; their positions on sickness and health and their conclusions about medicine were
gleaned by what they had observed over time-tested trials and tribulations. For the true healer,
experience shaped and molded belief and daily observation informed flexible bodies of theory.
For the misguided “learned physician,” all experience had to be understood within the limits of
accepted theory and all observations hammered into the constraining borders of orthodox belief.
The physicians will study a very fine theory; they will discover the causes of infirmities
107
Ibid., fol. 21r-v.
264
and remedies to cure them, and they when they come upon some difficult case, they
will not know how to produce a cure. Then some very old experienced hag will come
along, who, with the rules of life and some enema will make the fever cease, with an
unction will make the pain go away, and with some fomentation will make the patient
sleep; and in so doing, the old hag will know better than the physician.108
Eamon, Camporesi, and others have argued that Fioravanti’s primitivist, anti-intellectual
views and consistent emphasis on purging and evacuating the body of impurities directly reflect
ideational tendencies consistent with sixteenth-century religious reformation and Catholic
exorcism. As provocative as these ideas may be, I am content to consider Fioravanti’s criticism
of learned medicine on a more basic level here. In the literary war of words between professional
physicians and neo-scholarly empirics, Leonardo Fioravanti typified the best of the latter. By
placing experiential learning and empirically derived ideas above theoretically determined
knowledge, Fioravanti pulled the rug out from under those university professors locked behind
closed doors and rendered their self-proclaimed monopoly on truth worthless. Only the itinerant
traveler, the wandering collector, and the curious experimenter inhabited the truly valuable arena
of learning—nature’s physical landscapes; the valleys, streams, meadows, and forests that
composed mother earth.
Fioravanti’s nihilistic sweep of learned medicine equaled Laurent Joubert’s dismissal of
empirics in both nature and scope. For Fioravanti, the rise of institutionalized medicine
undermined the art of healing. When the state reserved the legal right to practice medicine for
108
Fioravanti, Della fisica dell’ecellente dottore Leonardo Fioravanti. Also see Eamon, “With the Rules of Life and
an Enema,” 29-44, and Science and the Secrets of Nature, especially 186-187, as well as Camporesi, La miniera del
mondo, artieri, inventori, impostori, 10-11.
265
university doctorates, vast numbers of ordinary people were denied proper medical care. The
politics of exclusion kept the numbers of doctors low, their incomes high, and the sick in dire
straits.109
Leonardo Fioravanti seemed to think himself a rather unique individual. But the man was
neither exceptional nor peerless. In many ways, his life, career, and natural philosophy closely
resemble those of another sixteenth-century Italian humanist named Girolamo Ruscelli.
Girolamo Ruscelli (1500-ca. 1566), also known as Alessio Piemontese, was one of the
“professors of secrets” criticized by Tommaso Garzoni in 1585.110 But Ruscelli also had many
admirers. In fact, Francesco Sansovino tells us that Ruscelli enjoyed a fine reputation as a
scholar and man of learning among Italy’s finest academics.111 Indeed, Ruscelli traveled
extensively, studied language, translated ancient books, composed poetry, and published works
of literary criticism. He also practiced alchemy, wrote books on natural philosophy, and formed
organizations dedicated to research and learning. But most importantly, for my purposes,
Ruscelli displayed a keen interest in medicine and healing in the sixteenth century.112
Like many others discussed above, Girolamo Ruscelli graduated from the University of
109
Fioravanti, Secreti medicinali, fol. 26.
Garzoni, La Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, fol. 80v. Readers will recall that
Piemontese/Ruscelli was also criticized by Thomas Browne in print (see above).
111
For Sansovino’s praise, see Piemontese, Secreti nuovi di maravigliosa virtu, fol. ii, from my copy microfilmed by
Venice’s Biblioteca Marciana.
112
The best insights into Girolamo Ruscelli/Alessio Piemontese can be found in the man’s books. See Secreti del
reverendo donno Alessio piemontese and Secreti nuovi di maravigliosa virtu. In the second volume, Ruscelli
claimed to be Alessio Piemontese. I have seen several publications in the archives of the University of Padua written
by “Girolamo Ruscelli, a.k.a. Alessio Piemontese.” Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio piemontese ranks as one of
the most heralded publications in 16th-century Europe. Shortly after its appearance in 1555, it was translated into
Latin, French, English, Dutch, and German. By the end of the seventeenth century, close to one hundred editions
were printed in virtually every western European language. Ruscelli/Piemontese achieved a level of notoriety far in
excess of Leonardo Fioravanti. See Maylender, Storia delle accademie d’Italia, as well as Eamon, Science and the
Secrets of Nature and “Science and Popular Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy, 471-485. See also Eamon and
Paheau, “The Accademia Segreta of Girolamo Ruscelli,” 327-342. In addition, consult the following: Ferguson,
“The Secrets of Alexis;” Ferguson, Bibliographical Notes on Histories of Invention; Ferrari, I Secreti Medicinali,
Cultura Popolare Nell’Emilia Romagna, Medicina, Erbe e Magia, “Federazione Delle Casse di Risparmio e Delle
Banche Del Monte Dell’Emilia e Romagna,” 82-97; Camporesi, La miniera del mondo, artieri, inventori, impostori;
Stillman, “The Accademia dei Lincei;” and Middleton, The Experimenters: A Study of the Accademia del Cimento.
110
266
Padua. Although he did not take a medical degree, Ruscelli gleaned an insatiable interest in
natural philosophy during his studies in northern Italy. But Ruscelli also developed an aversion
to scholasticism, Aristotelianism, and conventional education while at Padua. After graduation,
Ruscelli traveled to Rome and contributed to the development of educational academies
dedicated to the study of nature and philosophy. The goals of Ruscelli and his colleagues, if we
may take them at their word, were to establish institutions dedicated to experimental research,
the development of practical knowledge, and the enhancement of utilitarian scientific learning.
Ruscelli helped develop an institution called Accademia Segreta during the 1540s. The
Academy emerged as an establishment dedicated to the acquisition of “secrets” and the
cataloging of remedies, formulas, and recipes to help people deal with the basic challenges and
issues of everyday life. “Experimentalism” quickly emerged as the working methodology and
official epistemological philosophy of the academy and medicine became their prime concern.
Ruscelli’s Accademia Segreta developed remedies and formulas for curing illness through the
trials and tribulations of repeated tests, systematic observation, and meticulous record keeping.
In his medical literature, Ruscelli ignored Aristotelian rationalism and scholastic
philosophy, deemphasizing the significance humoural theory placed upon balance and
moderation for healthy regimens. Unlike scholarly works of sixteenth-century medicine, no
“philosophy of the body” or general statement regarding healthy lifestyles exists at the outset of
Ruscelli’s books. Also dismissed were the official drugs of classical pharmacology, composed of
ingredients authorized by Hippocrates, Galen, and Dioscorides. Replacing the ancient
pharmaceutical tradition of university with an eclectic mix of “secrets” that could be not be
traced back to any single, coherent, systematic school of medicine, Ruscelli offered his own
“materia medica.” In fact, well over one thousand medicinal recipes and formulas seem to have
267
been produced by Ruscelli’s “Accademia Segreta” in about five years, and the vast majority
were catalogued in Secreti nuovi (1555) and I secreti (1567).
Ruscelli’s Secreti nuovi provides insightful understanding of the Accademia Segreta.
Here, Ruscelli explains how local physicians participated in the academy, administering the
newly created drugs developed by the institution. More importantly, Ruscelli describes the
philosophy of ‘experimentalism’ central to the Academy. The goal of the academy, Ruscelli
explains, was to “try out” or “prove” all the secrets and formulas in manuscripts or printed books
rarely consulted by most contemporaries. In addition, the group would test their own ideas and
produce their own recipes. The Academy adopted a methodological position: all of the recipes
endorsed would be “proven”—and here the word seems to be best translated as “tested”—three
times before accepted as trustworthy. As Ruscelli explains:
During our years together, we constantly experimented on all the secrets that could be
recovered from books, printed or written by hand, ancient or modern, and in so doing,
we adopted a method and a style; the method of experimentation; a better method
cannot be found or dreamed up. Of all those secrets we found to be true by doing three
experiments on each.113
This position demonstrates the collective dissatisfaction with the methodology,
epistemology, and modes of knowledge construction previously deployed by medical
philosophers, university professors and private academies dedicated to research.114
In Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese, Ruscelli critiques scholastic
113
114
Ruscelli, Secreti nuovi, fols. 3v-4r in my volume, professionally microfilmed from Venice’s Marciana Biblioteca.
See Eamon and Paheau, “The Accademia Segreta of Girolamo Ruscelli,” 75: 327-342.
268
epistemology and the traditional theories of knowledge which dominated sixteenth-century
European universities. Qualifying the significance and relevance of human reason to matters of
natural philosophy, Ruscelli writes, “The appointment and determination of God, concerning the
life and death of man is so secret and so far beyond the capacity of man’s reason and
understanding, that we know not when God hath prefixed the term of our life.” Nevertheless,
Ruscelli encourages his fellow man to fight sickness and poor health, writing, “In our infirmities
and weakness, we [must] use those remedies that God hath created.”
In an early section, Ruscelli describes his background and relationship with learning:
From my earliest youth being given to studies, I have mastered not only knowledge of
Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Caldei and Arabic tongue, and also of many other nations and
countries. But above all things, having by a natural inclination, taken a singular
pleasure in philosophy, and in the secrets of nature, I have wandered and traveled
abroad in the world the space of many years, with the intention of gaining all sorts of
learning from all types of different men. Through diligence and curiosity I have learned
many good secrets, not only from men of great knowledge, but also of poor men,
artificers, peasants, and all sorts of men….I have traveled many times to the Levant and
all over the entire world, never staying in any single place for more than six months, all
for the purpose of gaining knowledge of the universal sciences.
Recipes to cure gout, end baldness, remedy plague, heal wounds, treat burns, and the like
appear throughout this volume, generally written in itemized fashion, with one or two substantial
paragraphs for each particular subject. After explaining his triple-test method, in which each
269
recipe is “proven” three times, Ruscelli further democratizes his approach, assuring the reader
that physicians, surgeons, empirics, statesmen, gentlemen, monks, women, and ordinary peasants
all participated in the assessment process. Indeed, “learned men of honor” may be able to
“provide a great many more reasons and explanations” of such things related to health and
healing, but Ruscelli produces concrete, readily accessible, practical solutions to real human
problems. In fact, Ruscelli anticipates unjust criticism from his over-intellectualized competitors,
warning the reader that professional physicians, “moved by a certain pain and envy grounded in
evil, with a streak of jealousy, are disposed to blame and attack things that they have not
originated.”115
Indeed, Ruscelli explains his motivation for publishing his secrets in a fashion critical of
professional medicine and the state of sixteenth-century healing. Relaying a story of a dying
man, Ruscelli reflects upon an unfortunate bit of professional competition between himself and a
licensed surgeon in Milan. According to Ruscelli, a surgeon who knew his reputation for
medicinal remedies and rare secrets of nature consulted Ruscelli about the possibility of helping
a desperate artisan. Reluctant to share his secrets because he sensed the surgeon would “use them
for his own profit and honor,” Ruscelli offered to treat the sick man himself, free of charge. But
the surgeon refused the offer, fearing such a thing would ruin his professional reputation. After
much bickering and squabbling, according to Ruscelli, both the professor of secrets and the
licensed surgeon appeared at the sick bed of the artisan. But alas, the healers appeared too late:
I found him [the sick man] so near his life’s end that after he lifted up his eyes a little,
115
Piemontese, Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio piemontese, from my copy professionally microfilmed by
Venice’s Marciana Biblioteca; see “Lettori;” Secreti, fol. *iii. Many different editions of this volume were printed in
the sixteenth and seventeenth century; hence, pagination may vary.
270
casting them pitifully towards me, he passed from this world into a better life, not
having any need or use either of my secrets nor any other ideas with which to recover
his health.
Ruscelli claims to have retired to a secluded life in Piedmont shortly afterwards. But his
conscience would not let him rest. As he relates in Secreti:
Not having any power to put this experience out of my imagination, I soon realized that
I was a murderer. For refusing to give the physician my secret remedy for the healing of
this poor man, I was in fact guilty. [Therefore] I have determined to publish and
communicate to the world, all that I have, quite sure that few others have as much
information as myself. I shall put forth the most true and proved collection [of ideas];
true and experimented, not caring if some of them be written or printed in other books
than this one.116
Did this story actually happen as Ruscelli describes? Can we take this tale literally? It
would be foolish to underestimate Ruscelli’s penchant for rhetoric. Indeed, he was not even
“Girolamo Ruscelli” in this story. In this book, the good doctor passed himself off as Alessio
Piemontese. But whether literally true, embellished, or patently false, the story probably reveals
something at the forefront of Ruscelli’s mind, if not close to his heart: the disappointment he felt
concerning the state of healing. Professional jealousies, competition for patients, and battles for
pride and reputation among healers from various backgrounds greatly detracted from the art of
116
Piemontese, Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio piemontese, “Lettori;” Secreti, fol. *ii.
271
healing. Turf wars and scathing critiques among different types of medical practitioners from
different levels of the social scale emerged in the European medical marketplace.
But if such rivalries depressed Ruscelli, he did not refrain from participating in the war of
words between licensed physicians and amateur healers himself. Indeed, one finds self-serving
anecdotes, self-promoting analysis, and indirect dismissal of his main competition in much of
Ruscelli’s medical literature. A few examples shall suffice.
In 1518, while traveling on a ship captained by Pietro De Chioggia, heading from Milan
to Corfu, Ruscelli claimed to experience an attack by pirates. “One of the mariners obtained a
badly broken and badly burned arm,” explained Ruscelli. “The physician would have cut off the
arm,” remembers Ruscelli, “but among other things I carried about with me, I had just the
ointment necessary.” Ruscelli claims to have successfully treated the man’s wounded limb. “In
the space of five to seven days,” claims the good doctor, “he was miraculously healed.” This was
no stroke of luck, according to Ruscelli, as he concludes the tale by reminding the reader, “I have
had many such experiences.”117
In Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio, Ruscelli relates the story of a woman who
suffered stomach problems for years, despite treatment from many learned physicians. To add
credibility to his story, Ruscelli claims to have worked upon this woman with “a monk, of the
order of St. Augustine, a man of great knowledge and full of marvelous secrets.” Ruscelli had the
woman sleep with a special plaster upon her belly, fed her a diet of “gentle meats,” with “plenty
of cinnamon and safron,” and “sliced oranges.” He had the sick woman drink his special “Acqua
Vite,” with “crushed flowers of Rosemary,” in the morning and the evening. Before long, the
woman was “restored to health, made whole, colored and fair as before her illness…when no
117
The Secretes of the Reverende Maister Alexis of Piedmont, containing excellete remedies against divers diseases,
fol. 17-18.
272
physician could ever find a remedy for her during her sickness.”
118
In Secreti nuovi, Ruscelli describes the collective disposition of the members composing
Accademia Segreta. “In addition to our pleasure and utility,” writes Ruscelli, “we devoted
ourselves equally to the benefit of the world in general and in particular, by reducing to certainty
and true knowledge so many most useful and important secrets of all kinds, for all sorts of
people, by they poor, ignorant, male or female, young or old.”119 One needs only a superficial
familiarity with common perceptions of licensed medical practitioners during the sixteenthcentury to sense the criticism implicit in these remarks. With these words, Ruscelli takes issue
with regular physicians who treat only those capable of payment and ivory-towered medical
philosophers who research, preach, and study for the benefit of small groups of colleagues.
But in the long run, Girolamo Ruscelli may have been aiming higher. Indeed, this globetrotting master of classical languages, author, healer, and founder of institutions dedicated to
“developing knowledge of the universal sciences,” may have had more than social criticism in
mind. In a larger sense, Girolamo Ruscelli may be remembered as a man dedicated to eradicating
the methodological errors that inhibited the advancement of natural philosophy. Ironically, only
two years after Ruscelli’s death, the man most closely associated with this endeavor in the annals
of traditional Renaissance histories was born.
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In 1987, historian Peter Urbach argued that during the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, most European intellectuals considered Francis Bacon the “Father of
118
119
Piemontese, Secreti del reverendo donno Alessio piemontese, fol. 10r.
Piemontese, Secreti nuovi di maravigliosa virtu, Proem, fol. 3v.
273
120
Experimental Philosophy.”
Admittedly, the view has not gone unchallenged. Furthermore,
“experimentalism” represents a loaded term and easily misunderstood concept in the context of
early modern European natural philosophy. Indeed, Francis Bacon (1568-1626) may be
considered a great Renaissance figure, but he had little patience with the basic intellectual
orientation of scholarly Renaissance natural philosophy. Examining Bacon’s style of
experimentalism allows us to appreciate the variety, diversity, and complexity of philosophical
thought during the early modern period.
Francis Bacon looked suspiciously at discursive activities that relied upon inherited
doctrines, or sets of beliefs from the distant past, as the basis for theorizing. Bacon believed that
seventeenth-century natural philosophy would not improve until inherited doctrines had been
swept away and replaced by networks of experimentally derived principles and ideas.121
Although Bacon separated religion and philosophy, he held that the two could co-exist.122 Where
faith is based on revelation, for Bacon, philosophy ought to be based on reason. Crucially,
according to Bacon, the reason informing philosophy need be based on empirically derived
information.
“Men have sought to make a world from their own conception and to draw from their
own minds all the material which they have employed,” Bacon once wrote. “If instead of doing
so,” Bacon suggested, “if men would only consult experience and observation, they would have
the facts and not opinions to reason with, and might ultimately arrive at knowledge of the laws
120
Urbach, Francis Bacon’s Philosophy of Science, 4.
Most modern texts on Francis Bacon reflect some form of this idea. See Eamon, Science and the Secrets of
Nature, 7, and Kuhn, “Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions,” 31-65, especially 34. See also Ash, Power,
Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England, especially the Introduction, iii, and chap. 4, “Francis Bacon and
the Expertise of Natural Philosophy.” See also Farrington, The Philosophy of Bacon, especially chap. 3, “The
Refutation of Philosophies.”
122
McKnight, The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought,; see the introduction.
121
123
which govern the material world.”
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Bacon held that men of his generation did not understand
nature because they had never adequately consulted, observed, and studied the physical world.
Bacon’s theory of knowledge depended upon acute observation of nature and physical
phenomena.
The discovery of things useful to life is not to be looked for from the abstract
philosophies, as it were the greater gods, no not through they devote their whole powers
to that special end…but [instead] from sagacious experience and the universal
knowledge of nature, which will often by a kind of accident, and as it were while
engaged in hunting, stumble upon such discoveries.124
Much has been written about Bacon and inductive reasoning. The traditional
interpretation of the “inductive method,” in which networks of observations of particulars
gradually constitute a scaffold from which logicians formulate general laws, graphically
oversimplifies Bacon’s original idea. Bacon used analogy, conjecture, imagination, and intuition
when inferentially combining observations to reach conclusions.125 Bacon also held that no one
could infer knowledge about physical phenomena by observations gleaned in isolated fashion or
overly precise contexts; observations about the evaporation of water or a flower’s bloom must be
contextualized against an imposing backdrop of axiomatic complexity regarding nature in
general. For Bacon, one should not study evaporation under a tightly controlled experiment with
strictly monitored variables; instead, one needed to consider evaporation in as many different
123
Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum (1609), cited from Vickers, ed., Francis Bacon: The Major Works, 24.
Bacon, De sapientia Veterum (1609), quoted from Eamon, “With the Rules of Life and an Enema,” 30.
125
See Park, “Bacon’s ‘Enchanted Glass,’” 290-302.
124
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contexts as possible. Simply put, Bacon’s “inductive method” was a good deal less systematic
than the “inductive reasoning” later associated with the fictive Sherlock Holmes. Western school
children learn of “Bacon’s Inductive Method”—from one fact, deduce another; from sets of
facts, produce an axiom; rigorously tested axioms may be combined to produce laws—but Bacon
himself might not have endorsed such a method.126
Nevertheless, Francis Bacon rejected the scholastic style of knowledge production which
relied upon rigorous logic and rational deduction proceeding from sets of orthodox principles. He
turned his back on the deductive syllogistic style of philosophy used in early modern
universities. In De augmentis scientiarum, Bacon suggested a methodology of learning in which
“new knowledge is discovered by ingenious adaptation of existing knowledge, rather than by
formal inference from fundamental principles.”127
According to Bacon, the derivation of experimentally produced knowledge should initiate
an endless cycle. Upon discovering a new relationship, Bacon suggested, one must ask what
other ideas related to this newfound truth might also be valid. Bacon reversed the order of steps
within given experiments to determine if corresponding knowledge, related to the conclusions
drawn from the original inquiry, might also be gained. Sir Francis believed that multiple
explanations of any given phenomena could be simultaneously valid. Bacon held that simply
because a given principle or axiom had been determined true, it did not mean that other
possibilities related to the point in question might not also be true. Water extinguished fire, but
certain amounts of water, under certain conditions, might also enhance fire. Glass was created by
heating sand, but glass might also be forged by some other totally distinct method. In short,
126
See Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton and The Great Instauration, as well as Webster, ed., Health, Medicine
and Mortality. Also see Schmitt, Reappraisals in Renaissance Thought.
127
See Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse, 144. See also Farrington, The Philosophy of
Bacon, chap. 3, “The Refutation of Philosophies.”
276
Francis Bacon believed nature teemed with infinite dynamics, unlimited sets of relationships, and
never-ending possibilities. Broad sets of “truths” derived from orthodox principles hardly
reflected the Baconian theory of knowledge.128
At first glance, it would seem reasonable to conclude that Francis Bacon’s natural
philosophy and theory of knowledge dovetailed neatly with those of Alessio Piemontese,
Leonardo Fioravanti, and Isabella Cortese. Like “i professori de secreti,” Bacon engaged in the
“hunt for knowledge,” hoping to stumble upon those hidden secrets stored in the bosom of
mother nature. Like Paracelsus, it would appear, Bacon believed nature to be teeming with life.
Indeed, it would be a quick jump to assume that Bacon believed all things within the physical
world contained a basic “nature” of their own, as Paracelsus did, and that this “nature”could be
unlocked and utilized for practical purposes. Furthermore, upon superficial examination, Bacon’s
natural philosophy and theory of knowledge would seem to resemble that of Levinus Lemnius.
Both men viewed nature as a giant storehouse filled with delicacies awaiting human
appropriation. Neither man seemed to care much for the subtle, nuanced hair-splitting of ancient
philosophers with their emphasis on “cause,” “effect,” and “first principles.” Both Lemnius and
Bacon were primarily interested in useful knowledge, rather than thought for thought’s sake.
Indeed, with regards to their respective natural philosophy and theories of knowledge, the Dutchborn Lemnius, the Italians Piemontese, Fioravanti, and Cortese, the German-born Cornelius
Agrippa, the Englishmen John Symcotts, George Starkey, and Nicholas Culpepper, and the
French-born Ambrose Paré, would all seem to share crucial epistemological and metaphysical
positions with Francis Bacon. Unlike Laurent Joubert, Scipione Mercurio, Tommaso Garzoni,
James Primrose, John Securis, and Johannes Dryander, the former group of natural philosophers
128
See Solomon and Martin, eds., Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought; see also Henry,
Knowledge is Power, and Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science.
277
seemingly cared little for scholastic knowledge and the traditional orthodoxy of early modern
universities.
With regards to natural philosophy in general and the art of healing in particular, we
would seem to have a sharp divide separating two distinct camps, as outlined above. But that is
only if we accept the binary arrangement of medical practitioners Laurent Joubert established in
his 1578 Erreurs populaires. Falling into the polemical trap set by Joubert and his followers may
help us organize our ideas about early modern medical philosophers, but doing so necessitates
ignoring more than we consider.
If we describe various styles of natural philosophy deployed and the sum total of
technical practices devised to cure illness during the Renaissance as “early modern healing,” we
are talking about a daunting complexity of theory and action. The vast collection of discursive
practices included in such a category cannot be meaningfully arranged in bipolar fashion. Even
the seeming similarities between Francis Bacon, the famous critic of scholasticism and “Father
of Modern Experimentalism,” and the “professors of secrets,” do not stand up to critical scrutiny.
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According to Francis Bacon, most seventeenth-century natural philosophers tended to
neglect experimentation. But that hardly means Bacon approved of the quality of
experimentation that was being performed in the universities, academies, salons, and workshops
of the later Renaissance. In his voluminous literature, Bacon commented on many different
forms of experimentation conducted throughout Europe. Sir Francis rarely flattered his fellow
experimenters and colleagues in the field of natural philosophy.
278
In criticism that may well have been directed at the style of experimentation conducted
by the Royal Society of London, where seventeenth-century natural philosophers worked to
minimize variables, establish consistency, and maintain standardization in their experimental
processes, Bacon complained about technicians who worked in conspicuously small and closed
contexts. For Bacon, as described above, proper inquiries into nature were characterized by large
questions on grand scales, so as to properly appreciate the huge of sweep of things in the
physical world. Hence, Bacon criticized the scholarly Englishman William Gilbert, who prepared
a lengthy experimental treatise on the magnet in 1600.129 “The inquiry must be enlarged,”
remarked Bacon, “so as to be more general.” In a series of remarks that may have also been
directed at the Paracelsians, Bacon said, “no one successfully investigates the nature of a thing in
the thing itself.”130 Bacon believed the only way Gilbert could meaningfully understand the
magnet, including its potential healing properties, would be to observe the object against the
backdrop of the larger physical world. Sir Francis also seemed to think it silly to spend so much
time worrying about magnets—a sentiment many scholars shared in their collective criticism of
popular magicians and uneducated folks.
But Bacon also criticized learned natural magicians and their experiments. In a series of
remarks that may well have been aimed at Giovanni Della Porta and his legion of followers,
Bacon criticized the preoccupation of natural magicians with provoking wonder. The natural
129
Gilbert, De magnete.
Cited in Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 288. Although Eamon offers no such argument, my feeling is
that Bacon objected to the Paracelsian idea that all things contained a certain “virtue,” or core property, that might
be called a physical object’s “nature.” Paracelsus believed the “natures” of things in the physical world could be
liberated by chemical manipulation and utilized for healing purposes. Manifestations of this idea existed at many
different levels of both early modern and ancient natural philosophy. At the nucleus of an onion resided pure
“onionness.” At times, Bacon seemed to fall in line with such thinking. After all, his remark that “no one
successfully investigates the nature of a thing in the thing itself,” implies that all things have an inner nature. But in
my investigation of Baconian literature, ideas about liberating the “essence” or getting at the “vital spark” of
something were usually dismissed.
130
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magicians, according to Sir Francis, believed themselves to be privileged illuminators whose
knowledge exceeded those natural philosophers of normal intelligence. The very phrases and
labels such as “natural magician” and “cunning man,” Bacon implied, were shot through with
implications of superiority. But Bacon derisively equated natural magicians with the clowns at
the circus; their main purpose was to baffle, amaze, and astonish. Even when natural magicians
achieved something of potential interest, they did so mainly to entertain, rather than master some
useful practice or technique. As explained above, the scholarly physician James Primrose once
argued that any authentic remedy or legitimate cure had to be grounded in a rational explanation;
real remedies were only “secrets” to those who failed to understand the relationship between
cause and effect and the nature of disease. Bacon sounded very much like Primrose when he
wrote, “The mark of genuine science is that its explanations take the mystery out of things.”131
But Francis Bacon may have directed his most incisive critique at the late sixteenthcentury “professors of secrets.” Bacon charged “I professori de secreti” with fundamentally
misunderstanding nature. In looking for this little secret here, that wonderful trick there, and the
promise of new recipes to be found only in the Levant, these silly people failed to appreciate the
comprehensiveness and interconnectedness of nature. “Wandering and straying as they do with
no settled course, taking counsel only from things as they fall out,” wrote Bacon, “they fetch a
wide circuit and meet with many matters, but make little progress.”132 Like a scholastic
philosopher immersed in Galenic humoral theory, Bacon chided the naïve collector of secrets
who thought himself in possession of some aberration or inexplicable dynamic in nature after a
recent purchase at some ridiculous carnival. “What in some things is accounted a secret has in
131
Cited from Bacon, Refutation of Philosophers, in Farrington, The Philosophy of Bacon, 123; cf. Bacon, Novum
Organum, in Works, 4:71-72. See also Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, 19-23, and Eamon, Science
and the Secrets of Nature, 289.
132
Bacon, Novum Organum, in Works, 4:87, 104, 107; see also Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 289.
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others a manifest and well-known nature,” Bacon remarked, “which will never be recognized as
long as the thoughts and experiments of men are engaged only in the former.”133
As Eamon has pointed out, Bacon denounced the practice, characteristic of the books of
secrets literary tradition, of random compilation of experiments in bound volumes. Bacon
insisted that experiments must be properly reported and arranged in tables, or “histories,”
designed to lead investigators systematically toward axioms and larger principles.134 Any student
investigating the table of contents in a work from Piemontese, Fioravanti, Cortese, Zapata,
Timotheo Rossello, Pietro Bairo, Tommaso Bovio, Giovanni Capello, or any other author
associated with the “books of secrets” tradition will instantly understand the criticism. The
volumes all seem to lack meaningful arrangement or sense of order. Recipes and formulas
remain listed in seemingly random fashion with little or no implication of larger meaning.
In a series of criticisms that may well have been aimed at Girolamo Ruscelli and the
Accademia Segreta, Bacon criticized the perception of experimentation he sensed among the
professors of secrets. “Whereas the professors of secrets conceived of experiments as tests of
whether a recipe worked,” William Eamon explains, “for Bacon an experiment represented an
attempt to find an entrance into the secret of nature’s workshop.”135 But if Bacon had entered
Girolamo Ruscelli’s workshop and experienced all the different aspects of the Paduan’s approach
to natural philosophy, Sir Francis may have been pleasantly surprised. In many ways, Girolamo
Ruscelli was more “scholarly physician” and less “vernacular empiric” than simple observation
might imply.
133
Cited in Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 289.
Ibid.
135
Ibid., 289. Eamon quotes Bacon from Novum Organum, in Works, 4:87, 104, 107.
134
281
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Girolamo Ruscelli shunned the broad, imprecise remedies of Galenic medicine designed
to restore “humoural balance” and the comprehensive “regimens of health,” which required longterm alterations in lifestyle for effectiveness. Instead, Ruscelli revealed the power inherent in
nature by spelling out the formulas, concoctions, and solutions that worked when directly applied
to specific medical problems. Empirically derived, tested, and proven by experimentation,
Ruscelli’s remedies offered sufferers immediate relief. In fact, no theories of “healthy regimens”
or “philosophy of the body” exist in the preambles of Ruscelli’s books, as the culture of early
modern scholarly medical publication generally required. Nor did Ruscelli pay homage to
Aristotelian rationalism and scholastic philosophy in his discourse on health and healing.
Semantic word-playing and intellectual jostling apparently meant little to Ruscelli and his
audience. Nevertheless, a close look at Ruscelli’s work reveals many fundamental similarities
between the healing methods of Accademia Segreta and the medical philosophy of early modern
European universities.
First of all, Ruscelli did utilize many basic concepts of humoral theory in his rambling
discourse on healing. Concepts like “humours” and “complexion,” words like “balance” and
“moderation,” can be found in much of Ruscelli’s medical literature, even if the good doctor
never started a book which proceeded from a working theory of the body, health, sickness, and
healing based on such concepts. At times, Ruscelli’s insistence upon medicating during certain
times of the year falls in line with learned astrological medicine of the Renaissance. At other
times, Ruscelli’s encouragement to purge the body of corruption or eliminate putrefaction would
seem to be directly derived from the pages of a sixteenth-century university text. Ruscelli rarely,
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if ever, explained the concepts of humours or the ideas behind complexion, nor did he indicate
why it might be helpful to medicate in September or October; he simply utilized basic theories of
learned medical philosophy.
For some examples, let us begin with a topic Ruscelli believed himself fully qualified to
address: pestilence and epidemics. Toward the end of Book I in I secreti del reverendo donno
Alessio piemontese, Ruscelli offers one of his many sections on such questions. But this
particular entry sounds closer to orthodox humoural theory than the “book of secrets” tradition:
An advertisement and warning of great importance to preserve a man’s life in
times of pestilence.
Because the evil humors that exist in man’s body can easily be corrupted and infected
by bad air, it is good to keep the stomach and the head clean and purged, not to
overload them with eating and drinking, but to abstain from gross meats, and to purge
himself as often as possible after overeating of bad things with some gentle and familiar
[element] of purgation.136
Ruscelli’s suggestions to “clean,” “purge,” and “abstain from overloading,” reveal a
concern with balance, whether conscious or otherwise, that is almost certainly related to
scholarly notions of humoural balance. Similarly, the curious use of the word “corruption”
(corruzione) belies a strong scholarly influence. At the early modern university, properly
ordered, well-functioning bodies enjoyed humoural balance with healthy complexions,
characterized by harmonious amounts of heat and moisture; no word more succinctly defined the
136
I secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese, fol. 43v in my volume, professionally microfilmed by
Venice’s Marciana Biblioteca.
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loss of humoural balance better than “corrupted.”
On folio 4 of Book I in I secreti del reverendo Alessio piemontese, Ruscelli suggests a
“potion or drink, to be used instead of syrup, good for men of all complexions, that will drive
away the evil humours.”137 Later, in the very same section, this professor of secrets suggests a
solution “that is to be taken twice a year, unlike some ordinary medicine; once in the Spring time
and once in September.”138 On the twelfth page of the same volume Ruscelli casually declares
that “all manners of canker disease and sores, which are commonly called pustules, actually
come from putrified humours.”139 Several sections later, Ruscelli describes a remedy for “all
sorts of pockes” that will “draw away evil humours” from any part of the body. The patient must
simply apply the solution on the “corrupted part of the body.” The remedy will “draw all the
corruption from such places,” and “restore balance” and good health.140
These considerations hardly prove that Girolamo Ruscelli belonged to the scholarly camp
of Renaissance physicians. Indeed, Ruscelli practically defined himself as one of the sixteenthcentury’s “professor’s of secrets.” His two major books contain the word “secreti’ in the title.
Like most writers working in the “books of secrets” genre, Ruscelli did not preface his books
with elaborate theories of the body, discourses on disease, or long-winded discussions of cause
and effect. Judging by his literary style, one might conclude that Ruscelli was not a medical
philosopher. The “secrets” of Alessio Piemontese did not flow from any systematic theory of
health, sickness, and healing. Early modern European universities considered legitimate medical
practitioners to be natural philosophers engaged in healing. But there is nothing to indicate that
Girolamo Ruscelli shared that view.
137
Ibid., fol. 4v.
Ibid.
139
Ibid., fol. 12v.
140
Ibid., fol. 14r.
138
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Or is there? In the proem of Secreti nuovi (fols. 1-7), one finds several interesting
passages regarding Ruscelli’s thoughts on the art of healing. This book was organized by
Ruscelli’s nephew and published after Ruscelli’s death. Hence, there exists the possibility that
Ruscelli never intended for the proem to be published. At the very least, we may consider the
possibility that Ruscelli never intended the proem to serve as the introduction to Secreti nuovi.
Nevertheless, the proem survives, and in it we read about Ruscelli’s Accademia Segreta:
Our intention was first and foremost to study and learn about ourselves, there being no
other study or discipline (this is especially true in natural philosophy) than such to
make the most diligent inquiries. A true anatomy of the things and operations of Nature
itself follows [the study of the self]. For one sees that the origin and development of
medicine, as well as the other disciplines central to human life, and the very ornaments
and things of the world, as helped by art.141
The idea that studying the self, or the human being, represented a crucial component of
the systematic contemplation of nature dominated many ancient, medieval, and early modern
western philosophical traditions. With this passage, Ruscelli conjures up images of the
microcosm/macrocosm relationship between the human body and the universe, so central to the
scholarly natural philosophy. The body could only be truly understood by analyzing the cosmos,
and the ultimate road to self-knowledge led to the study of nature. Similarly, conquering the
mysteries of the body and the self could lead to a deeper understanding of the physical world.
Ruscelli’s passages may be interpreted in a variety of ways. For example, one might
141
Piemontese, Secreti nuovi, fol. 3v.
285
conclude that the Divine created both man and the world in His own image, imbuing both the
human body and the universe with a certain divine spark; understanding the one would lead to
better understanding the other. On the other hand, one might take a more structural and
materialist view, holding that both the human being and the universe represent concoctions of
physical matter which happen to be closely related, both governed by sets of laws that can only
be understood through systematic observation. Arguably, Ruscelli’s suggestion that “a true
anatomy of the things and operations of Nature follows the study of the self,” might fit the latter
description. In this sense, both the human being and the universe consist of real matter,
characterized and sustained by physical phenomena, and capable of being understood by close
physical examination.
But the accuracy of my interpretation of Ruscelli on this point hardly matters. For now, I
will be satisfied to demonstrate that Ruscelli does, in fact, possess a distinct philosophy of
nature. In fact, he seems to think the art of medicine must proceed from a philosophy of nature.
“The very origin and development of medicine,” Ruscelli claims, “as well as the other disciplines
central to human life,” must proceed from a set of ideas and their subsequent elaboration about
nature. Like many other early modern men of letters discussed in this chapter, the Latin- and
Greek-speaking Girolamo Ruscelli seems to have been first and foremost a natural philosopher.
Indeed, in Girolamo Ruscelli we see a man disposed to think in terms of form, matter, essence,
and dialectical analysis.
In his later years, Girolamo Ruscelli gravitated towards the art of healing. If we take his
written testimony at face value, we may believe that in old age, he found it necessary to publish
his life’s work for the benefit of public consumption. Viewed from this perspective, Girolamo
Ruscelli may be seen as a learned natural philosopher who studied health and healing, rather than
286
a vulgar peddler of old wives’ tales and folkloric medicine.
A comparable set of paradoxes emerges if we look closely at the life and career of
Leonardo Fioravanti. As explained above, many historians of medicine remember Fioravanti as a
vociferous critic of scholarly European medicine. Indeed, in his eight major medical
publications, Fioravanti offered scathing criticism of university-based healing. He criticized
scholarly physicians and licensed healers for the corrupt politics of exclusion they employed
within the medical marketplace; he rejected Aristotelian logic, scholastic philosophy, and
contemporary reverence for ancient thinkers, and he warned that medical knowledge would
never expand under the current conditions of its production. But whether he realized it or not,
Fioravanti himself remained heavily influenced by ancient medical teaching and Renaissance
conceptions of health and healing.
Leonardo Fioravanti believed in the theory of the four humours, accepted the stomach as
the origin and essence of humoural phenomena, and subscribed fully to ancient teaching
regarding evacuation and purgation. Indeed, Fioravanti sounded like a scholarly physician when
he insisted that a poorly disposed stomach exported altered blood, thereby upsetting humoural
balance. “The first cause of all infirmities is the indisposed and corrupt stomach,” he wrote,
“from which follows the corruption of the entire body.” He commonly suggested drugs to induce
evacuations (vomiting and bowel movements) and blood-letting to release bad humours from the
blood.
From the corrupt stomach follows the corruption of the entire body and by reason of
this cause the blood along with the interior parts suffer, and it follows that to liberate
the body from all kinds of infirmities it is necessary to evacuate it of corrupt humours,
287
whether by vomiting or by purgation. The truth of this is verified every day by
experience, which shows that those medicines which provoke vomiting, evacuating a
great deal, cause much better effects than any other for the health of the sick body.142
Indeed, when once forced to justify his medical epistemology, Fioravanti declared that
his methods of healing were drawn from ancient Hippocratic doctrine, which happened to be
completely misunderstood by the modern physicians.143 Whether he viewed himself as a latterday Luther, divinely inspired prophet, or heaven-appointed agent of change, as Eamon has
argued, or whether his emphasis on purging impurities reflects the influence of sixteenth-century
reformation theology, as Camporesi suggests, one thing remains clear: Fioravanti remained
under the sway of Hippocratic/Galenic teaching and Renaissance manifestations of ancient ideas.
Laurent Joubert, Mercurio Scipione, and John Securis argued that university-based
medicine constituted the only proper form of healing. According to these men, only thoroughly
trained and properly licensed medical philosophers restored the sick to health. Untrained, naïve,
and ignorant amateurs did more harm than good for the misguided people who sought their
assistance. Fioravanti, Ruscelli, and Lemnius reversed the argument. For these self-styled
empirics, learned medicine constituted a hopelessly misguided discourse. Obsessed with logic
and philosophy, professional physicians searched books for answers that could only be found in
nature and the physical world. These arguments shared certain characteristics. Joubert, Mercurio,
Securis, on the one hand, and Fioravanti, Ruscelli and Lemnius on the other hand, all attempted
to rationalize and justify their professional activities and ways of life. But their arguments
142
Rostino, Compendio di tutta la cirurgia….Di nuovo ristampato, & dall’eccellente M. Leonardo Fioravanti,
ampliato & aggiontovi un nuovo trattato, fol. 166 in my copy professionally microfilmed by Venice’s Marciana
Biblioteca.
143
See Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 181.
288
transcended purely technical questions. Indeed, the self-serving ideological polemics of these
men were laced with righteous moral and ethical implications.
What might this mean? Joubert, Mercurio, and Securis seemed to think that empirics and
vernacular healers committed crimes against nature by virtue of their existence. Joubert couched
his perception of legitimate healers in Biblical proverbs. Mercurio, as well as James Primrose
and Cosimo Aldana, never hesitated to associate non-learned healers with the black arts of
witchcraft. Similarly, men like Fioravanti, Lemnius, and Ruscelli critiqued their adversaries with
venomous language and stinging invective. Why did Fioravanti associate institutionalized
medicine with organized crime and charge its individual practitioners with lawlessness? Why did
Fioravanti’s critics consistently bring up Leonardo’s lack of familiarity with the classical
languages of Latin and Greek? Surely, the fact that university instruction relied upon those
languages explains much, but a certain dynamic of social and cultural distinction would seem to
emerge here. Were considerations of social class the driving force behind all this invective?
After all, the scholarly physicians described above all sprang from the aristocracy. While men
like Ruscelli tried to pass themselves off as Latin-speaking globetrotters, and Lemnius and John
Symcotts did attend medical school, the latter group of medical practitioners do tend to emerge
from more modest backgrounds. Regardless of their socioeconomic standing, many of the selfstyled empirics never finished university, a crucial component of cultural capital in these matters.
Does the antagonism and suspicion among men of different social standing explain the polemics
among these healers?
Marxist historians still publish books on the scientific “revolution,” but class determined
analysis does not explain the positions of people like Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Francis
Bacon, or Paracelsus. Agrippa and Bacon came from aristocratic backgrounds, while Paracelsus
289
enjoyed wealth and privilege at various points in his life after thoroughly conquering the
challenges of university education. All three men looked most suspiciously at scholarly
medicine. But crucially, they dismissed scholarly medicine for different reasons.
How can we account for Giambattista Della Porta? Born a Neopolitan aristocrat, Della
Porta published prolifically in Latin for scholarly audiences. But Giambattista never attained a
university degree. Why did Francis Bacon equate Della Porta with circus clowns and second-rate
carnivals? Why were men like Sir Thomas Browne and James Primrose so concerned with the
gullibility of the crowd and the credulity of the masses? Why did Fioravanti and Paracelsus often
speak of cleansing society and purging the social order?
Thoughtful responses to the questions raised above could fill entire volumes. But
meaningful reflection on these issues should not focus upon the conceptual and discursive
languages of medicine, health, and healing. The clashes among these men cannot be explained
by professional differences within the art of medicine or natural philosophy.
These medicalized culture wars did not take place in vacuums most suitable for study by
modern students of medical history. The disputes and debates surveyed above emerged in
socially and culturally constructed worlds quite different from our own, where perceptions of
legitimacy and the right to do natural philosophy depended upon prejudices regarding the
religion one practiced, the city of one’s birth, the native language one spoke, and the company
one kept.
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Chapter Five
Regulating the Venetian Medical Marketplace:
Charlatans, Mountebanks, Empirics, and Apothecaries—The Institutions that
Governed Them and the Laws that Policed Them, 1500–1700
The middle years of the sixteenth century represented a difficult time in the professional
career of the Italian healer Jacopo Coppa. Although never a licensed physician, Coppa dedicated
much of his life to developing and selling medicinal remedies and healing agents. But from 1545
through 1568, he struggled to obtain licenses to peddle his merchandise in Venice and Florence.
In fact, the trials and tribulations involved in Jacopo Coppa’s attempts to gain commercial
legitimacy in Venice, Florence, Padua, and Bologna shed important light on the policing of early
modern Italian medicine.
In 1559, Coppa petitioned Venice’s Giustizia Vecchia, a bureaucratic body authorized to
supervise trade within the city, for a license to market his special medicinal syrup in the public
squares.1 But the Giustizia Vecchia could not process Coppa’s request. Instead, the board
consulted another state body, the Collegio dei Medici (College of Physicians), for advice
regarding Coppa’s petition. After a lengthy delay, the College of Physicians declared that Coppa
would have to fulfill their licensing requirements, as well as obtain a permit from the Health
Office (Provveditori alla Sanita) in order to legally sell his product.2 To help establish his
legitimacy, this self-proclaimed “charlatan” (ciarlatano) introduced a set of permits and
certificates from medical authorities in Bologna and Padua. But these measures seem to have
only added to the legal complexity surrounding Coppa’s application.
1
2
Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, Collegio Medico-Chirurgico, 9695, 10r-v.
A.S.V., Provvedditori alla Sanita, Busta 730, 254v–256r.
291
The College of Physicians did not fully acquiesce upon receipt of Coppa’s documentation
from Bologna and Padua. Instead, the board offered Coppa a “good news/bad news” reply. The
good news was that Coppa’s medicinal product had been deemed acceptable and legitimate. The
bad news was that only a licensed physician would be permitted to prescribe and sell such a
thing. Coppa fumed that the physicians “treated me unfairly,” and acted with “hateful prejudice”
when considering his request.3 Somewhat surprisingly, the Health Office (Provvedditori alla
Sanita) granted Coppa a license to sell his syrup. But the College of Physicians (Collegio dei
Medici) never budged.
In one sense, the strange case of Jacopo Coppa does not typify the experience of nonlearned medical practitioners seeking legal legitimacy in early modern Venice. As this chapter
shall demonstrate, amateur healers routinely obtained licenses to market medicinal products,
often in direct, straightforward fashion. But in another important sense, Jacopo Coppa’s
experience does shed significant light on the policing of early modern Venetian medicine.
Coppa’s case exemplifies the jurisdictional disputes that often resulted when a variety of state
bodies assigned to oversee common social phenomena interacted in Renaissance Venice.
Empowered with ever-changing, imprecise rules and regulations and burdened with overly
broad, vague political objectives, a multitude of legal bodies attempted to police commercial
exchange in the Venetian medical marketplace. Haphazard, unbalanced, and inefficient legal
oversight resulted.
The purpose of this chapter shall be to describe the Venetian Republic’s attempt to
govern and legally police the ever-expanding medical marketplace during the period covered in
this dissertation. My focus shall be on the non-learned healers without university degrees—the
3
A.S.V., Provvedditori alla Sanita, Busta 730, 288r.
292
self-proclaimed “charlatans” and “mountebanks,” and those derisively described by licensed
physicians as “empirics.” From time to time, examples of comparable phenomena in other parts
of Italy and the larger European continent, especially England and Germany, shall be discussed
as well. As with other aspects of this dissertation, the Italian experience often serves as a useful
template for understanding healing practices in a larger European context.4 The goal of this
chapter shall be to demonstrate the expansion of the medical marketplace during the late
Renaissance and to provide another conceptual lens—in this case, the view gleaned from state
regulation—of the wide variety of healing practices used to cure early modern illness. This
chapter is necessary to explain the activities associated with various medical practitioners
discussed throughout this dissertation.
But in a larger, more important sense, this chapter shall challenge some of the basic ideas
and assumptions expressed in recent histories of medicine. In the last ten years, a significant
amount of scholarship has been published concerning the legal organization of the early modern
Venetian medical marketplace. David Gentilcore, Michelle Laughran, Richard Palmer, John
Henderson, and Jon Arrizabalaga have examined the governance and legal regulation of drugs
and remedies during the period covered in this dissertation. Several of these scholars have
attempted to demonstrate how various players within the medical marketplace, such as
apothecaries and pharmacists, tried to advance their interests as groups within the social,
political, and economic order of Venetian society at the expense of their closest competitors.
4
To cite two brief examples, David Gentilcore suggests that the Italian “charlatan,” which shall be described in
greater detail below, “represented the prototype for itinerant practitioners throughout Europe.” See Gentilcore,
Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, 2. In the same volume, Gentilcore explains that the Venetian style of
policing commercial medical exchange spread to other states on the Italian peninsula and to other areas in Europe;
see 132. Much of the rest of Europe had policed commercial exchange of medicinal products long before the period
covered in Gentilcore’s book, but as this chapter shall demonstrate, some important parallels can be drawn between
Venice and England, France, Spain, and elsewhere.
293
Michelle Laughran has argued that during the sixteenth century, apothecaries attempted to
“professionalize” their craft by distinguishing themselves from illegitimate healers who
prescribed fraudulent medical remedies. By establishing themselves as the legitimate producers
of special services, according to Laughran, these apothecaries sought to hammer out and control
a market for their own expertise, especially in relation to licensed physicians who prescribed
officially recognized medicinal remedies.5 Others have attempted to divide and distinguish the
various non-learned healers of the early modern period into specific compartments. David
Gentilcore has argued that early modern Italian charlatans established a distinct identity as
Renaissance healers with shared sets of practice and common styles of self-fashioning.6
Much of this scholarship has been empirical, quantitative (Gentilcore has established a
“Charlatan’s Database” which lists 1,596 licenses issued to 1,075 different charlatans over 250
years during the early modern period), structuralist, and positivistic. Several of these scholars
seem to have assumed that evidence suggesting greater state efforts to govern the medical
marketplace automatically translated into more efficient policing of drugs, remedies, and
medicinal practice. Others have taken state attempts to legalize certain drugs and delegitimize
others—the Venetian Senate established an “official botanical garden of medicine” (Orto
Botanico) at the University of Padua in 1545, and Pietro Michiel and Pietro Mattioli published
official encyclopedic volumes of all legitimately recognized herbal remedies shortly thereafter—
to mean that the greater part of medicinal herbs and remedies used in sixteenth-century Venice
were thoroughly chronicled and widely understood by authorities.
5
See Laughran, “Medicating With or Without ‘Scruples,’” 95-107.
See Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy and Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy. See
also Gentilcore, “Was There a ‘Popular Medicine’ in Early Modern Europe?” and “For the Protection of Those Who
Have Both Shop and Home in this City.”
6
294
My research indicates otherwise. Two basic conclusions described in the pages below
merit brief description here. I shall suggest that a great deal of commercial exchange within the
Venetian medical marketplace—indeed, the vast percentage of services rendered and drugs
purchased—took place outside the state apparatus of legal oversight and beyond the critical
scrutiny of public regulation. Secondly, I shall argue that state regulation of the medical
marketplace can only be properly understood within the context of political culture in early
modern patronage society. Phenomena that might anachronistically be described as corruption,
extortion, and heavy-handed state intervention represented basic aspects of Renaissance
Venetian society. Paying the state for the right to do business, greasing powerful palms, and
sharing one’s prosperity with social superiors characterized commercial activity in the “Most
Serene Republic.” The licensing and regulation of commercial activity in the Venetian medical
marketplace did not proceed from purely medical considerations. Instead, the political culture of
patronage society most directly influenced the legal policing of the early modern Venetian
medical marketplace.
With these arguments in mind, I hope to demonstrate that in early modern Venice, a
much greater variety of drugs, remedies, and healing prescriptions existed than can be
understood by surveys of statutory law. Furthermore, the compartmentalization of players within
the medical enterprise into categories such as charlatans, mountebanks, or magical healers and
the separation of various healing practices into distinct camps, such as religious healing,
Paracelsian, or humoral medicine, represent overly structural conceptualizations of modern
historians imposed upon the past. My research indicates that many fundamental similarities
existed among healing practices at the various social levels of early modern Venetian society.
Eight years elapsed between Jacopo Coppa’s first petition of Venetian law and his final
295
documented entry in the Italian archives. During that period, many non-learned healers were
authorized to practice their trade within the squares and piazzas of Venetian society. Many others
went about their business without regard for legal authorization. This chapter shall consider some
of their stories. In order to do so, it shall be necessary to sketch a broad portrait of the legal
institutions designed to police the public medical marketplace of early modern Venice.
*
*
*
*
*
The public squares and piazzas of Venice buzzed with medically related commercial
activity during the Renaissance. Parish records, wills, guild proceedings, inquisition cases,
diaries of individuals, and publications of licensed physicians indicate the thriving nature of
Venice’s public medical marketplace. But the actions and records of state regulatory agencies, or
legal institutions authorized to oversee medically related commercial activity, also shed light on
the Venetian healing industry. Early modern Venice featured many such institutions. In fact,
there seemed to have been too many to do the job efficiently.
From 1540 to 1640, at least a dozen legally recognized institutions participated in the
policing and regulation of commercial exchange in the Venetian medical marketplace. Some,
like the Office of the Doge, the Ducal Council, the Council of the Forty, and the Council of the
Ten, represented fundamental components of Venetian constitutional government. These bodies
regulated public healing indirectly by establishing subordinate legal structures and delegating
authority, although some matters of medicinal exchange did come before the highest judicial
structures. Some, like the Giustizia Vecchia, represented legal bodies of broad jurisdiction, that
were not specifically designed to concentrate on healing. Authorized to “supervise trade,” the
296
domain of the Giustizia Vecchia theoretically included medically related commerce, although
this body rarely had the final word in questions regarding healing. Others, like the Provedittori
alla Sanita (Public Health Office) and the Collegio dei Medici (College of Physicians)
represented institutions specifically designed to deal with matters of public medicine. The latter
institution originated as a civic body—an organization among doctors—that was essentially
incorporated into the government and empowered with legal regulatory authority. The former
institution represented a state body, conceived and directed by the Venetian government. Still
others, such as the Collegio degli Spezieri (College of Apothecaries) represented lesser versions
of the College of Physicians, in other words, civic bodies that petitioned government for
regulatory power, but never achieved significant public authority. Even the Holy Office of the
Church participated in the regulation of healing and medicinal practice. Although the Church did
not grant licenses or authorize individuals to sell remedies or practice medicine, the Holy
Tribunal could bring charges of heresy upon healers suspected of engaging in theologically
invalid approaches to curing illness.
Relationships among the various legal institutions involved in the regulation of public
medical commerce never stopped evolving during the period covered in this study. But internal
squabbles between the Health Office and the College of Physicians tell only part of the story.
Legal authority to sell medicines could come from the outside as well. Throughout early modern
Italy, a non-learned healer could petition a powerful head of state for a license to sell medicines.
In Bologna, one could petition the Papal legate; in Milan, one could obtain permission from the
Spanish king’s representative; in Venice, one could seek favor from a member of the Maggior
297
Consiglio.7 In Venice, written permission from the Incurables hospital essentially constituted a
license to sell a medicinal product. Inconsistent official responses, perhaps best explained by the
capriciousness of the authorities involved, further complicated the processes of legal regulation.
At times, licenses granted in one city were readily accepted in other locales; at other times,
external authorization meant nothing.
Disentangling this mess of overlapping, intersecting, and perpetually evolving multiple
jurisdictions represents a daunting task. To do so, we must examine the origins of state
regulation within the Venetian medical marketplace, even if the earliest years of such activity
remain unclear. The conspicuous professional “medicalization” of northern Italy can be detected
by the rise of university medical faculties, hospitals and organizations of trained practitioners—
this occurred from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries8—but the selling of medicines
by untrained merchants dates back to antiquity. When did the itinerant pedlars and public
merchants come under public scrutiny in the Venetian Republic? When did legal institutions
designed to police public medical commerce emerge?
A variety of state sponsored institutions dedicated to public health seem to have been
erected in the thirteenth century.9 We may call them “protomedicati,” a term which refers to
early modern tribunals legally authorized to oversee medical practices.10 Although these
protomedicati theoretically possessed authority over public medical commerce, their main
responsibility seems to have been maintaining sanitary conditions throughout the Venetian
7
See Gentilcore, “Figurations and State Authority in Early Modern Italy.”
See Siraisi, Medicine and the Italian Universities, 1250-1600.
9
Stefanutti, Documentazioni cronologiche per la storia della medicina, 37-40.
10
Pomata, Contracting a Cure, Introduction, xi-xvi.
8
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Republic.11 If we stick strictly to the historical record of documented evidence, many of these
institutions seem to have flourished during times of plague, only to go out of existence during
periods relatively free of major epidemics.
The Venetian College of Physicians (Collegio dei Medici) appears to have originated in
1258. The College originally consisted of university graduates hoping to advance their collective
interests in the field of medicine. In the corporate societies of late medieval/early modern Italy,
guilds represented a fundamental component of social and political organization, and universitytrained medical practitioners, like artisans and tradesmen, sought to benefit via legally
recognized organization. Before long, the Venetian senate assigned the College of Physicians the
ability to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate medical practitioners. Graduation from
a legitimate university with a documented specialization in medicine represented the most
fundamental requirement of any applicant. The College could theoretically marginalize any
healer by simply denying him entry into their organization. But again, this institution concerned
itself with licensed medical practitioners within professional contexts and had no significant
relationship with the public medical marketplace. Licensed physicians within the College
sometimes published manuscripts criticizing fraudulent medical practice outside the universities,
but little or no legal policing of medical commerce resulted from such volumes.
The creation of the Venetian Public Health Office (Provveditori alla Sanita), however,
would seem to mark the beginning of coordinated state regulation of public medical commerce.
Originally established in 1478, the Provveditori alla Sanita owed its existence to troubling
outbreaks of plague from 1460 to 1475.12 Hence, it is reasonable to assume the responsibilities of
11
12
Bonuzzi, “Medicina e sanita,” 407-439, and O’Riordan, “Le professioni sanitarie,” 79-82.
Marchini, I Mali e I Rimedi della Serenissima, 24.
299
this body resembled those of the earlier Protomedicati. Indeed, Carlo Cipolla has argued that the
Health Office’s primary responsibilities consisted of disease control, sanitation, sewage, the
proper maintenance of the poor, and the licensing of begging, prostitution, and hostelries.13
But the Health Office was reorganized in 1537. More generously funded, “Il Magistrato
alla Sanita, as it was known in those days, would now be directed by the Senate and the Maggior
Consiglio.14 Within a few years, the Health Office began working with the College of Physicians
to oversee commercial exchange within the public medical marketplace.15 Michelle Laughran,
David Gentilcore, and Richard Palmer have argued that during the middle of the sixteenth
century, the Provveditori alla Sanita focused on the prosecution of individuals who possessed an
understanding of medicinals but prescribed remedies without obtaining medical degrees and
licenses from universities. Although I will take issue with this idea in the pages below, for now it
shall be necessary to point out that in 1559, the Provveditori alla Sanita seemed to take a cue
from the Collegio dei Medici in declaring that all unlicensed physicians selling medicinals shall
be lumped together; no distinctions among “Barbers,” Apothecaries, “Charlatans,” or others
would be made with regards to the public sale of medical remedies.16
Why did the Venetian Republic feel compelled to regulate and police public medical
commerce in the middle of the sixteenth century? Several factors would seem to have relevance.
Many historians of medicine agree that the art of healing experienced a commercialization in
mid-sixteenth century Europe. Both in Italy and elsewhere, so the story goes, medical practices
13
Cipolla, Public Health and the Medical Profession in the Renaissance, 32.
A.S.V., Provvedittori alla Sanita, Capitolare 1, b. 2, c. 136 t, 9 novembre 1537, cited in Marchini, I Mali e I
Rimedi della Serenissima, 65.
15
See Palmer, The Studio of Venice and Its Graduates, 10-11, and Laughran, “Medicating With or Without
‘Scruples,’” 98.
16
A.S.V., Provveditori alla Sanita, Rubrica delle leggi del magistrato eccellentissimo alla sanita, Reg. 11, 74r-78v,
cited in Marchini, Le leggi di sanita della Repubblica di Venezia, vol. 4, 175.
14
300
were transformed into series of services, each of which carried a certain monetary value.17 The
significance of the printing press and the rise in literacy levels, especially in sixteenth-century
Italy, may have also been a factor.18 The publication of remedies, formulas, and medicinal
“secrets” theoretically made the healing arts accessible to anyone who could read.19 Medical
books enjoyed a strong circulation in the public Venetian medical marketplace. In this sense, the
Venetian Republic’s desire to regulate mid sixteenth-century medical commerce probably
featured a strong economic component.
But the process of “social discipline” often associated with the Protestant Reformation
and the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century may also have been a factor. The
sixteenth century witnessed great change in western Europe. Vast percentages of Europeans died
from epidemic disease. Demographic shifts exceeded previous centuries as more Europeans
relocated than ever before. In the theater of spirituality and religion, Europe witnessed heresy,
reformations, and reactions; in politics, Europe witnessed a plethora of war and saw new forms
of state organization emerge; even new forms of knowledge construction appeared—the rise of
intellectual trends like humanism and the “scientific method,” associated with empirically
derived knowledge, made their mark in the sixteenth century. As with any generation, graphic
change brought uncertainty, alienation, and fear.
Transformations in medical practice and new approaches to healing demanded attention.
17
See Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine, especially chap. 5, “Disease and Treatment,” 115-153, and
Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, especially chap. 7, “Practice,” 193-231. See also
Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World of Early Modern France, especially “The Unitary Medical World of Early
Modern France,” 8-20; Gentilcore, Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy, especially chap. 3, “Medical
Practitioners and Medical Practice,” and chap. 4, “Charlatans and Medical Secrets,” 56-125; and Gentilcore,
Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, especially chap. 3, “Origins,” 91-118.
18
See Grendler, Schooling in Renaissance Italy, especially chap. 2, “Venetian Schools in the High Renaissance,”
42-71, and Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, vol. 1.
19
See Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, Introduction.
301
Much of medieval Europe considered medicine a sacred art. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215)
obliged physicians to insist that patients summon a confessor before any other treatment and
strictly forbade the use of any medical treatment by “sinful means” (for example, prescriptions to
consume meat on fast days). Furthermore, in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, theologians
argued about the legitimacy of charging fees for the transmission of medical knowledge.20 As we
have seen, thoroughly grounded in a Christianized Aristotelian logic, medical knowledge itself
possessed a divine flavor in the eyes of theologians, philosophers, and other learned men. The
sight of vulgar capitalists peddling medicinal “secrets” with a song and a dance in public squares
must have seemed undesirable to many sixteenth-century Europeans. For these reasons, the
expanding sixteenth-century medical marketplace may have inspired thoughts of discipline
within the aristocratic Venetian Senate.21
The development of the Republic’s official botanical gardens in Padua (1545) may have
contributed to increased regulation of public medical commerce within Venice as well. Designed
to increase knowledge of medicinal plants and to chronicle and categorize all known simples, the
“Orto Botanica” seems to have stirred interest in healing agents across a wide range of the
Venetian social spectrum.22 According to Gentilcore, “When the Venetian Senate founded the
botanical garden in Padua in 1545, it intended it to increase the knowledge of simples, and so do
away with errors and frauds in pharmacy which were causing deaths.” Hence, Gentilcore
concludes, “It is no coincidence that Italy’s Protomedicato tribunals were either created or
reinforced in the second half of the sixteenth-century. [They] were necessary to control both the
20
Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine, 44.
For ideas regarding the concept of social discipline in the context of the European Reformation, see Hsia, Social
Discipline in the Reformation; Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” 641-81; and Reinhard, “Reformation, CounterReformation, and the Early Modern State,” 383-404. For some interesting ideas specifically related to Venice, see
Martin, Venice’s Hidden Enemies, and Ruggiero, Binding Passions: Tales of Magic, Marriage, and Power.
22
See Ongaro, “La medicina nello studio di Padova e nel Veneto,” especially 126-132.
21
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use and the making and selling of medicines.”23
It is my contention that the licensers of medicinal commerce sought to “control the use,
making and selling of medicines” in order to squeeze profit from the public medical marketplace.
In this sense, the legal regulation of public medical commerce would serve the general
orientation of patronage society. To demonstrate this point, it shall be necessary to look more
closely at the earliest legal stipulations. It is to this task that I shall now turn.
*
*
*
*
*
Researching the legal regulation of early modern Venetian medical commerce can be a
tricky business. As described above, the College of Physicians (Collegio dei Medici) represented
the first institution empowered to license medical practitioners. Unfortunately, most of the
College’s records were destroyed by fire in the early nineteenth century. Today, the surviving
documents of the College remain mixed with the records of the Health Office (Provveditori alla
Sanita) in Venice’s Archivio di Stato. This makes perfect sense because these two institutions, as
explained above, combined during the 1540s in an attempt to regulate medical commerce within
the city. Unfortunately, the records of the Provveditori alla Sanita remain incomplete,
disorganized and difficult to consult systematically. With no index of statutory law as it emerged
chronologically, readers must uncover the regulatory principles indirectly, through exhaustive
readings of case studies, many of which are incomplete. Both native Italian researchers and
foreign scholars generally rely on the compilations of Nelli-Elena Vanzan Marchini for basic
23
Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, 101.
303
stipulations of early modern Venetian law.24
In sixteenth-century Venice, only the College of Physicians could endow a university
graduate with full legitimacy as a licensed medical practitioner by accepting him into their
corporation. At the other end of the spectrum, the Provveditori alla Sanita issued regulations
regarding the sale of public medicines by healers without university training, up until the 1540s.
But in January 1546, the two institutions combined their efforts to oversee commercial exchange
in the public medical marketplace. From this time on, the College and the Health Board worked
together to license those without university training who wished to sell medicinal remedies in the
squares and piazzas of Venice.25 The Health Office declared the right to examine “all Barbers,
Apothecaries and Charlatans…and every other person not incorporated in the College of
Physicians, that sold medicine publicly.26 Those caught selling medicines without licenses would
be subject to punishment, although no written set of rules existed to describe fines and penalties
to potential merchants. Punishments would be calculated on a case-by-case basis after hearings
conducted by the Health Board. Indeed, what remains foreign to our modern sensibilities is the
fact that aspiring merchants had no specific set of legal guidelines to consult prior to entering the
commercial marketplace. Licensing procedures would be established upon interview with
24
How the writers of the Nelli-Elena Vanzan Marchini compilations gained access to information otherwise
unavailable is unknown to the archivists of Archivio di Stato. Canadian scholar David Gentilcore, who has done
more research in this area than anyone else in the English-speaking world, relies heavily on Nelli-Elena Vanzan
Marchini himself. The main publications are as follows: Marchini, ed., Le leggi di sanita della Repubblica di
Venezia (Vicenza, 1995); I mali e I rimedi della Serenissima (Venice, 1985); Dalla scienza medical alla pratica dei
corpi: fonti e manoscritti marciani per la storia della salute (Vicenza, 1993); and La Memoria della salute: Venezia
e il suo ospedale dal XVI al XX secolo (Venice: 1985). Much of the statutory law cited in these books would appear
to be no longer available in the records of the Provveditori alla Sanita. Further complicating matters is the fact that
some threads of early modern legal regulation of medical commerce can be found only in Venice’s Biblioteca
Nazional Marciana. Unless otherwise noted, I consulted all the information cited in the pages that follow myself,
although some of my information has been cross-referenced with the printed versions published in the Marchini
editions.
25
Biblioteca Nazional Marciana Venezia, Collegio Medico-Chirurgico, Libro delle Parti (It. VII), 134r-135v.
26
Ibid.
304
prospective merchants. In other words, merchants hoping to sell medical remedies would have to
appear before the Health Office, explain their proposal, and meet the requirements subsequently
determined by the board.
During the 1540s, the Provveditori alla Sanita began issuing proclamations regarding
untrained healers publicly selling medical remedies. Such proclamations were called
“terminazioni,” or “disposizioni.” Although these terms are generally translated into English as
“edicts,”27 it is important to realize that these proclamations must not be confused with concise
articulations of statutory law or succinctly framed rules. Rather, these “edicts” generally
represent miniature diatribes and sporadic critiques of merchant behavior. Sixteenth-century
Venetian Health Board edicts typically characterize the comportment and activities of untrained
medical merchants, and they are almost always negative.
The earliest recorded edicts, printed in 1543 (three years before the official collaboration
between the Health Office and the College) describe collections of unofficial healers as people
who “mount banks, sing and dance, perform tricks and tell stories…prior to dispensing medical
treatments.”28 In regions politically dominated by Venice, such as Mantua and Padua, David
Gentilcore has uncovered edicts criticizing charlatans for “acting against Christian charity,” and
bemoaning the “excesses [used] in charlatan remedies.”29 “Throughout Italy during the early
modern period,” writes Gentilcore, “edicts decried disorders which happened daily, singling out
the hyperbolic, misleading and specious names charlatans gave their remedies…condemning
27
See Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy and Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy for
two major examples.
28
Originally noted in Giovan Antonio Boncio’s “Rubrica delle leggi,” in Marchini, ed., Le leggi di sanita della
Repubblica Venezia, I. 400, Edicts of January 4, 1543, and May 2, 1543.
29
See Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, 58-59. The first edict comes from Archivio di Stato
Padova, Sanita, 157, 40, June 8, 1693, the second from Archivio di Stato Mantua, Oct 2, 1624, originally quoted in
Luigi Carnevalli’s “Igiene e annona: Medici e farmacisti a Mantova prima del 1700.” See Gentilcore, Medical
Charlatanism, 59.
305
their practices of deceit perpetrated on the simple poor with their ineffective and sometimes
harmful remedies.”30 Incredibly, following these diatribes, the edicts generally outlined broad
guidelines for licensing vendors to sell medical merchandise. The general guidelines changed
frequently (“A Venetian law,” holds a sixteenth-century proverb, “lasts but a week”31). When
consulting the records of Health Office interviews for the purposes of licensing, one senses that
these broad principles were loosely enforced.
Let us examine some of the broad licensing guidelines issued by the Health Office during
the time under consideration. In 1567, medical merchants outside the College of Physicians were
asked to leave a sealed sample of their proposed remedies with the Health Office. Presumably,
this sample could be compared with remedies subsequently sold, to ensure that such merchants
offered the public the same remedies they presented the authorities.32 In 1590, the Board required
that prospective peddlers produce evidence of the efficacy of their medication, supplying the
names of patients willing to testify that they had benefitted from the remedies under
consideration.33 Whether this new stipulation rendered the 1567 rule obsolete remains unclear;
the original principle is never mentioned in second law. One thing, however, is quite certain:
both these stipulations were routinely ignored in cases awarding untrained healers licenses to sell
medicine. Many documented cases, as we shall see below, make no mention of the principles
described in 1567 and 1590. Indeed, from 1575 onwards, empirics were theoretically prohibited
from treating the sick without prior approval from licensed physicians within the College.34 But
such an idea, as I plan to demonstrate, must be interpreted as sheer rhetoric, with little or no basis
30
Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism, 59.
Finlay, Politics in Renaissance Venice, 37.
32
Boncio, Rubrica delle leggi ecc. del Magistrato eccellentissimo alla Sanita, I. 400.
33
A.S.V., Provveditori alla Sanita, Busta 736: 8 January 1590 m.v.
34
Boncio, Rubrica delle leggi ecc. del Magistrato eccellentissimo alla Sanita, I. 400.
31
306
in the reality of healing and commercial exchange within the Venetian medical marketplace.
My research suggests that the Venetian Health Office approved applications and issued
vending licenses to non-trained medical merchants in a fairly routine fashion. For all the harsh
rhetoric and polemical criticism directed at non-trained medical merchants by universityeducated physicians and elite medical philosophers and in spite of all the negative remarks
contained in the “edicts” from the Health Office, Venetian legal authorities generally licensed
empirics, charlatans, and mountebanks to peddle remedies with no discernible reluctance. Simply
put, aspiring vendors willing to pay application fees usually gained licenses to sell medicine
without considerable difficulty.
Let us consider some examples. In 1601, one Francesco Sian’s “secret remedy” to
alleviate the sore breasts of nursing females, which he described as “being of great help to many
poor women,” seems to have been licensed without complication. Sian’s application, a vague
description of the remedy and a note of brief testimony constitute the sole paragraph contained in
the official record. The application is routinely signed by two health officials and summarily
dated.35 Nine months later, in March 1601, Davide Tribulone’s special remedy for the “French
disease” (generally believed to be syphilis by medical historians) gained legal legitimacy without
complication. In his interview with the Health Board, Tribulone described himself as “a man that
knows a great many secrets of nature…for healing a wide variety of illnesses.” A citizen without
a university degree, Tribulone successfully argued that the remedy he brought before the board
today “would cure all those presently suffering from the French disease…as [it had] helped so
many in the past.” Officials Zuane Molini and Zuane Contarini indicate that they have heard
adequate testimony to support Tribulone’s claims to heal people. The Health Board granted
35
A.S.V., Provveditori alla Sanita, Busta 737, 8 June 1601.
307
Tribulone a license without extensive examination or interrogation.36 Molini and Contarini may
have been feeling generous. The following month, they approved a commercial license for one
Sarafin Polaco to sell his “medical secrets” in Venice’s public squares. Polaco, who described
himself as a man of “secreti meraviglioso” (marvelous secrets), claimed to have done many
“esperimenti” in his quest to find formulas and recipes for curing illness. Although not a medical
school graduate, Polaco seems to have easily convinced the officials of his “confidence in
healing.” Oddly enough, the documentary summation contains no specific lists of the medicinals
Sarafin Polaco hoped to publicly sell.37
A few years later, according to David Gentilcore, one Gregorio, son of Ferranti, whom
the physician Thomas Sonnet described as a “notorious and shameless charlatan,” was licensed
by Venetian medical authorities to publicly sell “orvietan,” an electuary against poison and other
infirmities.38 On July 24 1602, a man named Paulo Zonginello received a hearing from the
Health Office. Although not a licensed physician belonging to the College, Zonginello claimed
to be a “surgeon.”39 In a letter presented to the board, Zonginello describes himself as a “selfless
public servant,” who has “frequently worked without salary.” The man claims to have toiled as a
volunteer for the “Sestier di Canareggio,” dealing with “many victims of the contagion that
passed through these parts recently.” But now Zonginello wanted to earn some money. A
36
Ibid., 14 March 1602.
A.S.V., Provveditori alla Sanita, Busta 737, c.126r, 8 April 1602.
38
Gentilcore, Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy, 98.
39
As explained in previous chapters, in early modern Italy, “surgeon” or “barber” represents a broad term generally
describing practitioners that, among other things, commonly set broken bones, removed teeth, lanced boils, drew
blood from swollen accumulations of flesh, and attempted to cure infections with applications of heat. Although
well below the status of a legal physician, students could train in surgery within medical schools. But most early
modern “surgeons” were technicians cast from the craftsman’s mold. The different Italian states dealt with surgeons
in various ways. Florence expected surgeons to enroll in the “College of Apothecaries, Grocers and Surgeons.” As
described above, in Venice after 1559, the authorities would lump surgeons (“barbers”) into one general category of
non-learned medical practitioners. For information on the legal standing of surgeons in early modern Florence, see
Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Modern Florence. For Bologna, see Pomata, Contracting a Cure.
37
308
reference letter on his behalf indicated that Zonginello has knowledge derived “from all the
relevant books of our time,” and by all accounts his record of service had been “legal and
authentic.” Zonginello claims to have learned many skills and remedies and now would like to
put them to use. No specific set of proposed medicines appear in the documented record and it is
unclear exactly what type of license this man requests. Nevertheless, authorities do sign the
record in a fashion indicating legitimation of Zonginello’s testimony, and we must assume the
applicant has been granted the right to practice in Venice. In all likelihood, this man simply
wanted to be sure he could practice his craft and use his medicinals without legal harassment.
Although the surviving record typifies the vague, often incomplete nature of these documents,
Zonginello’s hearing seems to have gone well from the applicant’s point of view.40
In November 1602, Health Board officials Zuane Molin and Lorenzo Rimondo passed
judgment on Ruggier di Orsati’s request to legally sell two special remedies for toothaches. “My
secret for the teeth,” boasts Ruggier in written testimony, “is a root called Pilastro,” which he
describes as a “powerful but safe remedy.” This untrained healer explains that his other favorite
remedy, “l’ongia della gran Bestia” (nails of wild beasts), has always been efficacious for
toothaches as well. “Pilastro,” which later came to be known among medical botanists as
hypericum or “St. John’s Wort,” refers to an herb commonly found in northern Europe, often
used in a wide variety of healing formulas. “Pilastro” can be found in the “books of secrets”
tradition, including works by Girolamo Ruscelli, Leonardo Fioravanti, and Isabella Cortese.
Higher up on the social scale, Pietro Matthioli catalogued a description of this medicinal herb in
his encyclopedic volume prepared for the Venetian Republic.41 Hence, this particular herb does
40
41
A.S.V., Provveditori alla Sanita, Busta 737, 24 July, 1602, c.139v.
Matthioli, I Discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli, 709.
309
not represent a novelty. But one suspects Ruggier’s formula regarding the “nails of wild beasts”
represents an alternative pharmaceutical tradition bearing no relation to the classical
pharmacology which theoretically served to underscore official Venetian medicine.
Nevertheless, the Health Board licensed Ruggier di Orsati to liberally dispense these remedies
without impediment throughout Venice in 1602.42
But the first decade of the seventeenth-century did not represent a unique period in the
Venetian medical marketplace. The three previous decades leave evidence of similar phenomena
regarding the dissemination of medicinal products and the state’s attempt to regulate medical
commerce. By Paulo Preto’s count, in an eight-month period from 1576 to 1577, twenty-two
Venetian citizens successfully petitioned the Health Office for permission to sell a variety of
secret remedies, antidotes, and medicinal formulas for treatment of plague victims.43 Judging
from contemporary plague tracts, many other untrained healers attempted to market plague drugs
without bothering to pursue commercial legitimacy.44
But plague did not represent the only epidemic to stir commercial action in the early
modern Venetian medical marketplace. In fact, Laura J. McGough’s study of the French Disease
during this period provides valuable insights into many of the questions and issues regarding
state efforts to oversee medical commerce raised above.45 Precisely because McGough did not
concern herself primarily with the legal regulation of the medical marketplace, her work may be
free of many of the misguided notions from which recent historical writing in this area suffers.
McGough compared archival material from Venice’s Inquisition records from 1580 to
42
A.S.V., Provveditori alla Sanita, Busta 737, 9 November, 1602, c.133v, 134r.
Preto, Peste e societa a Venezia nel 1576, 90.
44
See Cipolla, Cristofano and the Plague and Public Health and the Medical Profession, as well as Calvi, Histories
of a Plague Year, and Cohn, The Black Death Transformed, especially chap. 4, “Signs: Chronicles, Plague Tracts,
and Saints’ Lives,” 57-82.
45
McGough, “Demons, Nature, or God?” 219-246.
43
310
1650 with mortality data from the same period in order to investigate responses to the Mal
Francese. “It is little wonder that patients thought the disease was curable,” writes McGough,
“since they could hardly navigate the city without encountering a vendor of medicines for a wide
range of ailments, including the French disease.”46 According to McGough, university-trained
physicians and popular healers sold their remedies as well as recipes for how to make them side
by side in the medical marketplace. “Recipes included a variety of everyday herbs and
substances, such as incense, chamomile, earthworms, and chicken fat, along with an occasional
exotic ingredient, such as Artemsia dramaculus or tarragon.”47 None of these ingredients could
be found in the official Venetian pharmacopia of university, but all of them could be discovered
in the self-help “books of secrets” authored by Alessandro Gardano, Alessio Piemontese,
Leonardo Fioravanti, and Isabella Cortese.48
In discussing the later part of the sixteenth century, McGough writes, “When a
practitioner applied for a license to sell medications from a ‘secret recipe,’ the Health Board
required that the healer produce some evidence that the medication was effective.” After
surveying several cases, McGough concludes that “the Health Board routinely approved such
applications.”49 To support her argument, McGough describes the case of Anzola del Sala, a
married woman who successfully applied for a license to treat the French disease and other
similar illnesses.50 McGough would have bolstered her argument even further had she included
the case of one Giovanni F. Mira, an amateur healer who successfully obtained a license from the
46
Ibid., 230.
Ibid., 231.
48
With regards to the texts mentioned above, see Gardano, Secreti diversi & miracolosi; Fioravanti, De’ Capricci
medicinali, Secreti medicinali, Il tesoro della vita humana, and Dello specchio di scientia universale; Cortese, I
secreti; and Piemontese, I secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese.
49
McGough, “Demons, Nature, or God?” 234.
50
Ibid.
47
311
Venetian Health Board in 1582 to sell his medicated wine for the treatment of pustules and sores
associated with the French disease. Mira used a license from the Roman Protomedicato and a
testimonial from Venice’s Incurable Hospital as evidence to support his request even though, as
far as I know, no written statutes acknowledge the significance or legitimacy of such things.51
The Venetian Health Office, restructured in 1546 to include the services of both the
original Provveditori alla Sanita and the Collegio di Medici, regularly approved applications and
issued vending licenses to non-trained medical merchants during the period considered in this
dissertation. Nevertheless, signs of relatively stringent oversight, capricious policing, and
meticulous regulation of medicinal commerce in Renaissance Venice do exist. Scholars like
David Gentilcore, Richard Palmer, and Michelle Laughran, who have focused on the legal
regulation of the early modern Italian medical marketplace and emphasized the restrictive nature
of such oversight, have produced evidence to support their claims of stringent policing. After all,
Jacopo Coppa, the sixteenth-century amateur healer discussed at the outset of this chapter, never
gained full commercial legitimacy in Venice. It is to similar stories and an analysis of their
historical value and overall meaning that I shall now turn.
*
*
*
*
*
In a collection of essays published in 2003 on healing in early modern Italy, David
Gentilcore discussed the legal regulation of commerce in the public medical marketplace. “The
medical authorities sought to keep a tight rein on what medicines were sold,” wrote Gentilcore,
“[concentrating] on public health as it was then practiced and enforced.” According to
51
A.S.V., Provveditori alla Sanita, Busta 735, 10 May 1582, 87v.
312
Gentilcore, “financial interests coincided with the desire to uphold the moral order.”52 Citing an
example of such legal regulation, Gentilcore relates the case of one Marchio Fedeli, a nonlearned medical practitioner, arrested by the Health Office for selling a purgative pill in Venice’s
Piazza dei Signori on May 4, 1641.53 Gentilcore compares Fedeli’s written defense with
testimony provided by another charlatan named Buonafede Vitali, for the purpose of examining
some of the remedies offered by such healers. Thanks to Gentilcore, these medicines, which
include “some rancid oils, a few crushed herbs, some honey [and] the most powerful arcana,”
may be examined by the modern reader as they were by the Venetian authorities almost four
centuries ago. Marchio Fedeli’s defense failed to persuade the Health Board.54
In the same volume, the like-minded Michelle Laughran chose to emphasize the case of
one Zuan Alvise, a self-proclaimed surgeon, brought before the Venetian Health Office for
illegally dispensing medicines in 1559. “Alvise was prosecuted for medicating without a license
from the College of Physicians,” explained Laughran, “fined L.150 and forbidden to practice
further without permission from the Collegi of Physicians and Surgeons.” In the same passage,
Laughran also relates how “Ciprian, an apothecary from the shop of the Annunciata (or Noncia,
in Venetian dialect) near the Church of the Frari, was likewise charged and fined L.50 di
piccoli.” Laughran concludes that “while the practice of popular medicine was not monolithic,
the Health Office seems nevertheless to have targeted the full spectrum of its practitioners.”55
Similarly, in his 1985 essay entitled “Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice in the Sixteenth
Century,” Richard Palmer relates a curious tale of an aspiring medical merchant named Galeazzo
52
Gentilcore, “For the Protection of Those Who Have Both Shop and Home in this City,” 115.
Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, 84.
54
Ibid., 84-85.
55
Laughran, “Medicating With or Without ‘Scruples,’” 98-99. In the case of Alvise, Laughran cites Archivio di
Stato, Provveditori alla Sanita, Busta 730, 13 April, 1559, 234r. For the case of Ciprian, Laughran cites Archivio di
Stato, Provveditori alla Sanita, Busta 730, 5 December, 1559, 251v.
53
313
Corniani. According to Palmer, “Corniani told the Venetian College of Physicians and the
Giustizia Vecchia of his intention to make the drug theriac, and [was told] it had not been made
properly for many years.” Palmer explains how the Venetian authorities relied upon the
Republic’s medical philosopher and author Pietro Matthioli, who, in 1548, had written about the
impossibility of manufacturing authentic theriac due to the unavailability of crucial ingredients.
Matthioli argued that “cinnamomo, balsamo, petroselino macedonico, mirrha, folio, meo,
chalciti, amomo, aspalatho and calamo aromatico were among the list of missing items
necessary to brew proper theriac.”56 Although no conclusive summation survives, we may
assume that Galeazzo Corniani never obtained legal permission to manufacture and sell theriac.
After all, the authorities suggested, such a thing could not be done properly.
These scholarly works share several basic ideas and raise a series of similar implications.
Gentilcore, Laughran, and Palmer believe a meaningful image of healing can be gleaned by
studying the legal regulation of commerce within the public medical marketplace of early
modern Venice. These scholars attempt to derive information regarding drugs, medicinal knowhow, and shared sets of healing practices at the non-scholarly level by surveying statutory law
and consulting the legal records of institutions designed to oversee medical trade. There is much
to be said for approaching the historical record in this fashion, and these scholars (Gentilcore in
particular) deserve credit for the vast amounts of research they have conducted. But the idea that
realistic reflections of healing practices in the early modern period can be derived from
56
Palmer, “Pharmacy in the Republic of Venice,” 109. Palmer’s citation of Matthioli is quite accurate. See
Matthioli, “I Discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Matthioli, 411. What Palmer does not point out is that if Matthioli were
correct, many self-help medical books sold in the squares and piazzas of sixteenth-century Venice would be
problematic. The books of Alessio Piemontese, Leonardo Fioravanti, and Isabella Cortese, to name just a few,
routinely call for the use of cinnamomo, balsamo, and mirrha for medicinal purposes. Furthermore, theriac,
“authentic” or otherwise, was routinely marketed in Renaissance Venice, regardless of the Health Office’s position.
See Stossl, “Lo spettacolo della Triaca.”
314
consultations of statutory law and records of judicial process may be misconceived. In the
paragraphs that follow, I would like to examine some of the theoretical questions involved with
this issue, while offering some views on early modern Venetian healing that differ significantly
from those recently published.
In my view, the vast percentage of social phenomena related to healing in the early
modern Venetian Republic—consultations between patients and practitioners, sales of remedies
and formulas, basic medical services—took place outside the influence of the legal structures and
lawful institutions designed by the government to police such things. Most patients and healers,
as best I can tell, sought cures and prescribed remedies in fashions largely unrestrained by
statutory laws. More unlicensed healers sold remedies than licensed healers. More remedies
concocted without regard to legal stipulations changed hands than remedies that conformed to
state law. If this is true, and I shall offer evidence to support this idea momentarily, then the
significance attributed to the Health Board by the scholars described above may be problematic.
Let us consider Michelle Laughran’s treatment of such questions during the crucial
period around the middle of the sixteenth century. According to Laughran, after the Health
Office and the College of Physicians combined their resources in 1546, “the Provveditori
declared the privilege of the Venetian College of Physicians to examine and license all Barbers,
Apothecaries and Charlatans of whatever status and condition, both residents and foreigners, and
every other person either male or female, who are not educated in general studies.”57 As
Laughran explains, “they also required that the Collegio keep track of the names of all those
practitioners who had received licenses and then communicate them to the Provveditori alla
Sanita, so that the Health Office could know who was licensed and who was not….[T]hose
57
Laughran, “Medicating With or Without ‘Scruples,’” 98.
315
caught practicing without such a license could be fined up to L.300, imprisoned for three months,
and then banished from Venice for five years.”58 Crucially, for the consideration of non-learned
healers, Laughran explains:
At the same time, the Provveditori began to focus their efforts on prosecuting those
individuals who traditionally possessed an understanding of medicinals but medicated
without authorization. The extant records indicate that between the mid-1540s and the
mid-1560s, the Provveditori would prosecute at least twenty times, individuals, from
remedy-peddlers to mountebanks, from itinerant healers to a possibly possessed
woman, Elena Drago (who may have been eventually investigated a little over a decade
later by the Inquisition)….The Health Office seems to have targeted the full spectrum
of its practitioners.59
But we must ask if twenty attempts at prosecution over a period of twenty years
constitutes a significant amount of legal policing. Are we to believe that an average of one
annual indictment greatly influenced the nature of commercial exchange in the sixteenth-century
Venetian medical marketplace? Perhaps such negligible prosecution records stem from strict
licensing procedures that ensured the legality of all aspiring medical merchants before they
entered the public marketplace. But according to Laughran, between 1541 and 1561, the
Venetian Health Office officially licensed less than six medical merchants per year.60
58
Ibid., 98. Laughran cites Palmer’s The Studio of Venice and Its Graduates, 55.
Ibid., 98-99.
60
Laughran cites B.M.V. Collegio Medico-Chirurgico, Notizie tratte dai libri dei Priori, It. VII, 2342-9695, 118r.
See Laughran, “Medicating With or Without ‘Scruples,’” 105, n32.
59
316
Such sparse numbers cannot be easily reconciled with sixteenth-century testimony
regarding the prevalence of amateur healers within the public squares and piazzas of Venice. We
have seen how the Augustinian monk and social critic Tommaso Garzoni (1549-1589) dedicated
several pages of his book Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (1585) to the
“professors of secrets, charlatans, mountebanks” and other suspicious types who engaged in
healing activities without proper training in my chapter on Isabella Cortese. According to
Garzoni, the piazzas and squares of Venice and other northern Italian cities swarmed with all
sorts of jokers and frauds willing to sell fantastic healing remedies and formulas.61 Originally
published in Venice, Garzoni’s work went through twenty-nine Venetian editions.
Garzoni’s testimony is corroborated by the Englishman Thomas Coryate. After a journey
to Venice in 1598, Coryate wrote that “the greater concourse of mountebanks exists here
[Venice] than in other cities, for in Rome etc, they are restrained from certain matters as I have
learned which are heere allowed to them.”62 Coryate may have been technically mistaken
regarding the legal aspects of such questions, but his firsthand testimony probably tells us more
than any statutory law. Besides, the law probably did not matter much. In her study of early
modern Italian female mountebanks, Beth Mirabella suggests that “as medical practitioners,
mountebanks generally lacked university education and must be considered informal as opposed
to formal healers….[A]s such, Italian mountebanks were drawn into the fiercely competitive
world of early modern healing, where not only were academically trained physicians obliged to
compete with each other in the public medical marketplace, but they also competed with a world
61
Garzoni, La Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo, fol. 80f-80v in my copy, professionally
microfilmed by Venice’s Biblioteca Marciana.
62
Coryate, Coyrats crudities, hastily gobbled up in five moneths travells in France, Savoy, Italy, 272. Many thanks
to Mary Fissell and the librarians at the Folger Institute’s Shakespeare Library for making me aware of this source.
317
of empirics, herbalists, and magical practitioners of every kind.”63 In a second visit to Venice in
1608, Thomas Coryate related how the mountebanks of San Marco’s piazza “set up their many
stages twice a day, that is, in the morning and the afternoone.” Coryatt described the “musicke,
plays and tricks,” generally followed by “an oration to the audience by the principall
Mountebank.” After the speech has ended,
The principall Mountebank delivereth out his very commodities by little and little. The
major things that they sell are oyles, soveraigne waters, amorous songs printed,
Apothecary drugs, and a Commonweale of other trifles. As many as a thousand people
may flocke together about their stages.64
Even if Coryatt exaggerated the numbers attracted by San Marco’s mountebanks, it is
hard to imagine how such popular activity could be enacted in strictly legal fashion given the
state’s modest licensing figures.
Fynes Moryson, a late sixteenth-century English visitor to Italy, described the unusual
healers and vendors of secrets he saw in Venice and elsewhere:
Italy hath a generation of empiricks who frequently and by swarmes goe from citty to
citty and haunt their markett places. They are called montibanchi or mounting banckes
or ciarletani of prating. The wares they sell are commonly distilled waters and divers
oyntments for burning aches and stitches and the like, but espetially for the itch and
63
Mirabella, “Stealing Center Stage: Female Mountebanks and the Negotiation of the Public Space in Early Modern
Europe,” publication forthcoming, delivered at the Folger Institute’s “Vernacular Health and Healing Colloquium,”
April 20, 2007, Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC.
64
Coryate, Coyrats crudities, 410-411.
318
scabbs, more vendible than the rest. Some sell Angelica of Misnia at twelve pence
English the ounce, naming a remote Country to make the price greater, for otherwise
that colde Country shoulde not yealde excelent herbes. Many of them have some very
good secrets, but generally they are all cheaters.65
It is ironic that Moryson mentioned “divers oyntments for the itch and scabbs,”
suggesting that such remedies were “more vendible than the rest,” for Mercurio Scipione, the
harshest critic of Italian charlatans, mountebanks, and other non-learned healers, objected most
vigorously to the unguents charlatans sold for scabies and the remedies they sold for chronic
itching. Any ointment that superficially treats the skin, according to Scipione, does more harm
than good to a sufferer who has not been purged of the illness causing the itch. “The ointment
closes and dries the scab,” explains Scipione, “which, if left alone, would [work] to discharge the
bad humour [causing the itch]…[I]nstead, the bad humour becomes enclosed within the body
thanks to the unguent and can cause very serious problems or death.”66
Mercurio Scipione’s work belongs to the literary tradition described in Chapter 4,
“Boundaries, Turf Wars and Scathing Critiques: The Various Social Levels of Medical Practice
Examine Each Other, 1550-1680.” As previously explained, Scipione was a learned medical
philosopher and licensed practitioner advancing a polemical critique of untrained healers in order
to protect his place within the medical profession. Readers will recall that Scipione’s 1603 De gli
errori popolari d’Italia represented a response to Laurent Joubert’s invitation to European
physicians to record popular errors concerning medicine and health among untrained healers.
65
Cited in Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 237. Eamon cites Moryson’s Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, 424425.
66
Scipione, De gli errori popolari d’Italia, libri sette, 267.
319
Joubert, the chancellor of the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier, published Erreurs populaires
in 1578 to initiate an attack on non-learned healers by scholarly medical doctors.67 While it is not
necessary to meticulously revisit the work of Joubert and Scipione here, some tidbits of
information from their respective texts will serve the current argument regarding the sheer
volume of non-learned, unregulated medical exchange in the Venetian public medical
marketplace.
For Laurent Joubert, the major problem facing the medical profession in the sixteenth
century was that Europe’s major cities were packed with ignorant healers encroaching upon the
domain of scholarly physicians. Joubert relates a story attributed to Alfonso d’Este, a late
sixteenth-century duke of Ferrara, in which the duke’s buffoon suggests there are more
“physicians” in the city than any other type of person. “There are almost two hundred of them—
and I only passed through one avenue between my house and yours….I’ll wager I could find
more than a thousand in this city if I were to go through all the streets. Find me as many people
in any other profession,” challenges the duke’s buffoon.68 But Joubert was in no laughing mood
when he charged that “almost everybody is copying the prescriptions of physicians, taking sick
people’s pulses, examining urine, giving opinions, and ordering the very opposite of what the
physicians say.” Joubert complained of the “surgeons, barbers, apothecaries, attendants,
midwives, charlatans, and other quacks such as merchants, who, in order to cut in on a portion of
the profession, are master meddlers,” within Europe’s major cities.69 Could Venice, one of the
most famous cities in Renaissance Europe, be excluded from Joubert’s critique? If so, the
67
Joubert, Erreurs populaires. Although I have used the original version, obtained from Venice’s Biblioteca
Marciana, there is also a version translated into the English language by Gregory David de Rocher. I indicate
precisely in these notations which version I am citing.
68
De Rocher, trans., Popular Errors, 68-69.
69
Ibid., 69.
320
chancellor of the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier did not say.
But for direct testimony on Italy, we can turn back to the Italian native Scipione. Like
Joubert, Mercurio blamed the poor state of medical affairs on the untrained, ignorant healers who
took advantage of the naive public. Speaking of Venice, Mercurio attacked the “errors
committed in the piazza,” by empirics and charlatans, who endangered the public with their
misconceived and often fatal remedies. Scipione could not understand how people could actually
purchase “remedies made of useless junk…authorized by the presence of some vagabond dressed
in velvet, approved by a clown and encouraged by some whore, confirmed by a million false
witnesses and just as many lies.” In the style of a university scholar forever immersed in
Aristotelian logic, Mercurio complained that “the charlatans have no understanding of the causes
of disease.”70
But the neo-scholarly empiric Leonardo Fioravanti, who had attended university, debated
medical philosophers, and published several books, toiled many a hot summer day in the public
piazzas of Venice, and he looked cynically at Mercurio Scipione’s emphasis on causes. “I don’t
know any worthy doctor who treats the cause,” wrote Fioravanti in 1561. “As for me, I have
never seen anyone treat the cause, but I have certainly medicated, have seen others medicate, the
disease, which is the effect. Why should you have to know about this damned ‘cause’?”71
Whether Fioravanti more closely represents one of the “professors of secrets” who
aroused the suspicion of Tomasso Garzoni or one of the quacks or charlatans so thoroughly
scorned by Mercurio Scipione is not important. What matters is that Fioravanti’s medical recipes
and formulas, many of which resided completely outside the official Venetian medical tradition
70
Scipione, De gli errori popolari d’Italia, 265-270.
Fioravanti, Secreti medicinali; in my copy, professionally microfilmed by Venice’s Biblioteca Marciana, this
passage appears on fol.26r. Pagination may vary.
71
321
of university, were available for sale every day in the public medical marketplace. His published
recipes for “olio benedetto,” “sciroppo magistrale,” “dia aromatica,” and “pietra filosofia” may
not have been duly recorded with samples filed at the Venetian Health Office—no law on the
books demanded any such thing—but they were readily available to anybody in the city who
could read.72 In fact, those incapable of reading might still benefit from Fioravanti’s presence.
“Anyone who would like to avail himself of my remedies will find me in Venice at San Luca,”
he wrote in Capricci medicinale (1561), “where I will always be ready for the service of all.”73
*
*
*
*
*
Medically related commercial activity flourished in the public squares of many northern
Italian cities during the Renaissance. Indeed, in much of sixteenth-century Europe, urban
medical marketplaces and medical economies were transformed by new providers of new
medical services. With little time, patience, or resources for the overbearing medical philosophy
and comprehensive regimens for living prescribed by scholarly doctors in Chapter 1, many early
modern Europeans took active interests in the new drugs, new treatments, and new ideas of the
late Renaissance. As medical services began to take on specific monetary values, competition
helped transform the public medical marketplace of cities and large towns. The ever-expanding
medical marketplace attracted healers from all different social classes, with various educational
backgrounds. “The changing medical marketplace attracted a multitude of medical empirics and
72
Medical books deemed contrary to the Catholic faith could theoretically be placed on the Holy Inquisition’s list of
censored volumes. No such books of Leonardo Fioravanti appear on any list of banned works. Isabella Cortese’s
1561 “I secreti” was published in Venice the same year as two of Fioravanti’s works. As explained in the previous
chapter, Cortese’s volume must have enjoyed commercial success as it was reprinted dozens of times. Yet Isabella
Cortese’s recipe for improving the male member, which included borax, storax, and two parts of crushed large wing
ants, never aroused legal reaction from the authorities. See Cortese, I secreti.
73
Fioravanti, Compendio dei secreti rationali, 43.
322
charlatans, who sold nostrums and powders in the piazzas and taverns of Italy’s cities,” writes
William Eamon. “Venice, in particular,” according to Eamon, “was renowned for its swarms of
charlatans and mountebanks, who peddled their miracle drugs in St. Mark’s square and delighted
visitors with their music, dance and entertainment.” Eamon suggests the printing press
accelerated these trends, “since it was but a small step from purchasing a remedy from a
pharmacist to buying a book of remedies to cure oneself.”74
Venetian authorities noticed such developments. In the middle of the sixteenth century,
bureaucratic and administrative reform created greater legal oversight of commercial activity
within the public medical marketplace. Several scholars have studied the period’s statutory law
and consulted the records of judicial process in order to better understand the legal regulation of
medical commerce. From these documents, these scholars have tried to glean reflections of
healing practices among late Renaissance Venetians. Much potentially valuable information has
been uncovered in the process. But the theoretical approaches and methodological practices of
such scholarship have their limitations.
The records of statutory law and judicial process under consideration, which are broadly
dispersed in a wide variety of unrelated historical documents, indicate a fairly limited amount of
commercial activity during the century from 1540-1640. As described above, the historical
record indicates twenty attempts at state prosecution directed at allegedly illegal medical
commerce during a twenty year period from the 1540s to the 1560s. In addition, the records
indicate the newly revamped Venetian Health Office issued an average of less than six licenses
per year from 1541 to 1561. These figures do not seem to reflect serious policing of the
voluminous amount of healing related activity indicated by other sources for the period in
74
Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 138.
323
question. The testimony of contemporary visitors, the reflections of contemporary practitioners,
the records of publishing houses, and the books sold at the time, among other things, all indicate
an ever-expanding, diverse, unrestrained medical marketplace. Cross-referencing the
documentary records themselves would seem to indicate, in my view, a more permissive form of
legal regulation than the restrictive policing portrayed by recent scholarship.
Perhaps the conspicuous willingness to deductively draw conclusions from surviving
archival evidence reflects a disposition common to Venetian historians. The “Most Serene
Republic” left lots of records. More than a few historiographical debates have originated with the
controversial use of Venetian sources. But historians of medicine studying other areas of Europe
have approached sources concerning the legal regulation of medical commerce cautiously. For
example, in her study Patients, Healers and the Law in Early Modern Bologna, Gianna Pomata
examined the licensing of non-learned medical practitioners by Bolognese authorities. According
to Pomata, “these licenses were clearly used to integrate popular medicine, at least in part, into
the official medical system. The Protomedicato’s attitude toward popular healers had a punitive
side (the enforcing of disciplinary actions) but also a permissive one (the issuing of licenses).”
Toward the end of the book, Pomata reflects cynically on the capacity of the Bolognesean state
to efficiently legislate on complex matters of healing. “In the juridical pluralism of the old
regime [the early modern period], that labyrinthine tangle of competing jurisdictions, early
modern people—even the common people—knew how to find their way to the court or
magistrate presumably most favorable to their case.”75
Similarly, in her reflections on legal regulation of healing activities in early modern
Germany, Mary Lindemann never attributed efficient, insightful, or meaningful policing to state
75
Pomata, Contracting a Cure, 83 and 145.
324
institutions. In discussing the health boards and regulatory agencies of seventeenth-century
Germany, Lindemann writes, “the German situation reveals many of the same traits that
characterized German political structures as a whole: it was a hodgepodge. No clear division of
responsibilities existed. A mix of privileges persisted and confused the relationships between
governors and the governed.” In speaking of the larger European continent, Lindeman remarks,
“By 1800, almost all governments had regulations in place to define legitimate practice and
practitioners. Still, these various ordinances seldom reflected the reality of medical practice.
Moreover, the constraints governments set on practice did not necessarily coincide with popular
understandings of ‘proper’ or ‘appropriate’ healers.”76
Deborah Harkness’s analysis of the legal regulation of early modern London’s medical
marketplace renders equally cynical conclusions. Discussing the case of one Paul Fairfax, an
amateur healer who sold a ‘miraculous brand of water’ in 1589, Harkness writes, “Fairfax, like
most medical practitioners in London, understood all too well how the medical market worked
and how, if necessary, someone without a license might evade the multiple, overlapping
regulatory bodies that vainly attempted to oversee the practice of medicine in the City.”
According to Harkness, “The system was riddled with gaps in coverage and a clever use of print
culture, patient testimonials, a false university degree, good connections, and the laws of supply
and demand, enabled Fairfax and other practitioners to work for years before running afoul of a
regulatory body like the College of Physicians.” Harkness concludes by suggesting the walls
between physician, surgeon, elite and empiric practitioner were remarkably permeable, while
casting doubt on the “seemingly confused palimpsest of guild regulations and city laws”
76
Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 177 and 198. Also see Lindemann, Health and
Healing in Eighteenth-Century Germany, especially chap. 1, “Medicine, State and Society,” 22-71.
325
attempting to regulate disputes among them.77
The highly structural, positivistic research and theorizing of recent Venetian scholarship
seems to ignore more than it considers. The surviving documentation of legal regulation in the
early modern medical marketplace is not adequate to glean meaningful images of the diversity,
variety, and magnitude of Renaissance healing practices. The sources can never shed light on all
the healing activities that unfolded outside the legal structures and institutions of regulation.
Deductive reasoning based on the information drawn from these sources is neither entirely
possible nor especially helpful. In a sense, drawing firm conclusions based on severely limited
documented evidence conjures up the intellectual dilemma expressed by Martin Heidegger—
how can we know that which we hold to be true or realistic is not best explained by
considerations outside our understanding, rather than the product of our insights? Are our
convictions the children of our limitations?
But the problem runs deeper. Portrayals of early modern healing gleaned from legal
sources tend to assume that health laws flowed mainly from medical considerations. When
historians of medicine examine the legal regulation of healing phenomena for the purpose of
understanding the “medical cosmology” of a given society, they proceed from a particular
perception of the relationship between health law and healing. If health law reflects healing
practices, then it must be reasonable to conclude that a given social order’s perception of the
body, interpretation of disease, and popular therapeutic methods shape and mold the laws
pertaining to such things. But the construction of law is never a simple matter. State regulation of
the medical marketplace in any society can only be properly understood within the context of
77
Harkness, Deborah, The Jewel House of Art and Nature, 69-71 of my manuscript version. Many thanks to
Professor Harkness for permission to cite these passages.
326
that society’s political culture. Broadly speaking, the political culture of early modern Venice
may be described as that of “patronage society,” where the state, or more specifically, the social
and political power brokers within the society, sought to benefit from public commerce,
reinforce social hierarchies, and squeeze capital from those unable to resist their power. In my
view, the political culture of patronage society represented the most direct influence on the legal
policing of the early modern Venetian medical marketplace. In the final section of this chapter, I
shall examine this idea.
*
*
*
*
*
In an essay concerning law and authority in the early modern Venetian Republic, Gaetano
Cozzi noted that two principles, ‘authority’ and ‘equality,’ have long been regarded as the
linchpins of Renaissance Venetian society. But in much of early modern Venetian life, Cozzi
suggested, the reality of ‘authority’ held the upper hand over any theoretical notions of
‘equality.’78 This phenomena certainly held true in the sphere of business and commerce. In the
Venetian commercial marketplace, as elsewhere in early modern Europe, not everyone enjoyed
equality, but everyone had some experience with authority.
Nevertheless, by early modern standards, high percentages of the Venetian population
engaged profitably in business. “A large proportion of this population is employed in
commerce,” reported the Spanish ambassador Don Alonso della Cueva in his 1618 report to his
crown, “and they make more money than they would in any other place.”79 In the realm of
78
Cozzi, “Authority and Law in Renaissance Venice,” 317.
Report on Venice attributed to Spanish ambassador Don Alonso della Cueva, Marquis of Bedmar: BL Additional
ms. 5471, ff. 147-53, cited in Chambers and Pullan, eds., Venice, A Documentary History 1450-1630, 260.
79
327
business in general and the public marketplace in particular, early modern Venice possessed an
unusual complexity and variety of social actors. Unlike other major European cities, no cultural
disposition prevented nobles from pursuing commercial activities. Hence, economically
advantaged Venetians conducted business alongside more modest merchants, while a variety of
itinerant traders passed in and out of the great commercial hub that was Venice.
But a commercial marketplace featuring participants drawn from various levels within
the social scale invited certain problems. Don Alonso della Cueva noted that nobles prospered
significantly in the Venetian theater of commerce, “and their gains are all the greater because the
authority and superiority over other people which they have acquired for themselves free them
from the dangers that beset other merchants.”80 Although the Spanish ambassador never specifies
the “dangers that beset other merchants,” it is clear that ordinary citizens enjoyed less social and
political organization and consequently less leverage and power than Venetians higher up on the
social scale. A quick example will suffice to make this point: while university educated medical
practitioners belonged to the College of Physicians and could present their interests in all legal
disputes with the power and authority of a well organized and respected institution, most
charlatans, mountebanks, and other non-learned empirics belonged, at best, to a guild, that did
little more than charge them membership fees.
Judging by his checkered past, itinerant ways, and personal testimony, Jacopo Coppa, the
hapless amateur healer whose story opened this chapter, appears to have been, at best, an
ordinary citizen and a person of modest means.81 This should not surprise us. Nancy Siraisi
suggests that in early modern Italy, lay practitioners and untrained healers generally appear to
80
81
Ibid., 257.
A.S.V., Provvedditori alla Sanita, Busta 730, 254v–256r.
328
have belonged to the milieu of urban guilds and crafts. “It is evident that empirics usually
occupied a lowly social as well as occupational position,” writes Siraisi, adding that “the practice
of medicine [at this level] was frequently combined with one or more of a variety of other petty
trades or crafts.”82 Did Coppa’s relatively disadvantageous social standing adversely affect his
petition for legitimacy? Perhaps, but it is difficult to say precisely how this may have been the
case.
When Coppa complained that the physicians of the Health Board “treated me unfairly,”
what exactly did he mean? Did Coppa refer to the chemical composition and physical quality of
the medicinal syrup he hoped to legally market? Probably not, because the Health Board deemed
the syrup acceptable and legitimate. But they would not permit an unlicensed physician to sell it.
The Board apparently had more than health and healing in mind.
Partly composed of university-educated licensed physicians, the Health Board may have
been trying to maintain the distinction between scholarly doctors and amateur healers. But this is
unlikely. The Health Board existed not to prevent the commercial marketing of new products,
but to benefit from them. As David Gentilcore cautiously points out (but never emphasizes), “the
licensing fees [collected by regulatory agencies] constituted a necessary source of revenue.”83
Like the Holy Tribunal of the Venetian Inquisition, the Health Board depended upon the
confiscation of capital from those within its clutches for its very existence.
It was not unusual for the Health Office to proceed to license a charlatan whom they had
earlier fined for operating without a license.84 Multiple legal jurisdictions, or the overlapping
82
Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine, 26.
Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, 108.
84
Ibid., 121. Gentilcore makes this point as well, but he brings it up in order to suggest that charlatans were not
perceived as a threat by the medical authorities.
83
329
authority of regulatory agencies—a guild could license a practitioner to sell a remedy, the
Giustizia Vecchia could authorize a healer to trade a medicinal product, the Incurable Hospital
could license an empiric to sell a formula, only to have the Health Office issue a fine for “illegal
commerce”—m ay have represented more of an opportunistic play to join the party of
exploitation and less a function of early modern legal disorganization.
During the second half of the sixteenth century, the Venetian Health Office started
incorporating amateur healers into the process of legal authorization itself. Presumably, such
measures represented an attempt at greater regulatory efficiency. The individuals involved would
be motivated by the potential for personal gain. Hence, in 1563, Leone Tartaglini became the
“capo for charlatans,” as appointed by the Provveditori alla Sanita.85 Some years later, one
Bartolomeo Gregolini gained a similar position with the Health Office. Gregolini gained
authority to oversee charlatans and other characters “who sell their medications without regard
for the laws and statutes of this office.” Gregolini’s salary would be a fraction of the fines the
office collected under his guidance.86
Approximately seventy years later, the Venetian Health Office made this position a bit
more formal. In the 1630s, a university-educated physician would be appointed “protomedicato,”
a sort of modern-day Surgeon General, and empowered to oversee all matters of medical
commerce within the city.87 Gentilcore relates how the Venetian physician Cecilio Fuoli became
the third in his family to become protophysician, succeeding his father and his uncle. The job
seems to have paid well. The protophysician “received all the emoluments and profits belonging
85
A.S.V., Provveditori alla Sanita, Busta 731, 5 July, 1563, 4v.
A.S.V., Provveditori alla Sanita, Busta 732, 21 June, 1572, 21v-22r.
87
Marchini, ed., I mali e I rimedi della Serenissima, 67-73.
86
330
and pertaining to the said office.”88
But if some untrained healers benefited from incorporation into the policing institutions,
more amateur medical practitioners suffered. In the early years of the seventeenth century,
Mantua, which had been politically dominated by Venice, began imitating Venetian initiatives.
The duke of Mantua started placing charlatans and empirics in regulatory agencies. In 1613, the
Mantuan College of Physicians ordered that charlatans prepare their medicines in apothecaries’
shops, under the supervision of trained physicians. One Tristano Martinelli, a man with no
medical training from any university, complained that “charlatans could no longer make a living,
because the apothecaries wares cost four times more than in Venice.” Martinelli went on to say
that the charlatans “have to grease the palms of the College protophysician and notaries, which
was not the case before.”89
Perhaps the necessity of greasing palms had been the case for Jacopo Coppa from 1545
through 1568. This type of thing seems to have been quite common in the experiences between
citizens and bureaucratic organs of the state. Specifically discussing the sixteenth century,
Gaetano Cozzi writes, “According to certain contemporaries, the frequency of cases of
embezzlement in the Venetian administration in this period was due to the fact that many jobs
were filled by men forced by their wretchedness to extort profit greater than that offered by the
normal salaries.”90 We should not be surprised that government employment and the occupation
of jobs within regulatory agencies struck many Venetians as opportunities for personal gain and
individual benefit. Such ideas were institutionalized. After all, Bartolomeo Gregolini’s position
88
Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy, 105. Gentilcore cites Archivio di Statto, Provveditori
alla Sanita, Busta 740, 164.
89
Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism, 108.
90
Cozzi, “Authority and Law in Renaissance Venice,” 299.
331
with the Health Office paid no salary per se. Gregolini’s compensation, as described above,
would be a fraction of the fines he collected with the power and authority of his legal position.
Ambition and greed undoubtedly drove certain individuals to excess. Even the visiting Don
Alonso della Cueva noticed in 1618 that “leading servants of the state, in positions of the highest
trust, have helped themselves and taken stipends far in excess of the rewards due to them for
their efforts.”91
But such notions of authority, privilege, order, and power did not flow solely from styles
of state formation and political culture. These ideas had an intellectual history as well. Many
years ago, Benjamin Kohl and Ronald Witt argued that the “secularization” of European culture
began in the Renaissance as the Middle Ages gave way to the early modern world. During this
transformation, the social and political prominence once enjoyed by ecclesiastics and military
authorities gradually gave way to the rising class of merchants and bankers. Kohl and Witt credit
the early Italian humanists such as Francesco Petrarca, Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni,
Francesco Barbaro, Poggio Bracciolini, and Angelo Poliziano as being facilitators of this
process.92 For Kohl and Witt, the Italian humanists provided the philosophical rationale
necessary to supplant an obsolete system of values created by loosely organized agricultural
societies with a new intellectual foundation for urban life dominated by commerce. Later
generations of early modern social and cultural historians have attacked ideas associated with
91
Report on Venice attributed to Spanish ambassador Don Alonso della Cueva, Marquis of Bedmar: BL Additional
ms. 5471, ff. 147-53, cited in Chambers and Pullan, eds., Venice, A Documentary History, 258.
92
Kohl and Witt, eds., The Earthly Republic; see the general introduction, 3-22, for my remarks concerning the
secularization of the Renaissance and the intellectual and philosophical justification for new social orders based on
banking and commerce. The humanist essays briefly alluded to may be listed as follows: Francesco Petrarca, “How
a Ruler Ought to Govern His State,” 35-78 of the Kohl and Witt volume, originally published as Rerum Senilium
liber XIV. Ad magnificum Franciscum de Carraria Padue dominum, in the 14th century; Francesco Barbaro’s “On
Wifely Duties,” 189-228 of the Kohl and Witt volume; Alberti, The Albertis of Florence; and Poggio Bracciolini’s
“On Avarice,” 241-292 of the Kohl and Witt volume.
332
“secularizing” trends, arguing that religion and spirituality endured in a variety of ways during
the late Renaissance. In addition, the value of top-down intellectual history has been roundly
questioned by many social and cultural historians. Nevertheless, essays such as Petrarca’s “How
a State Ought to be Governed,” Francesco Barbaro’s “On Wifely Duties,” Leon Battista Alberti’s
“The Alberti’s of Florence,” Leon Battista Alberti’s “Della Famiglia,” Poggio Bracciolini’s “On
Avarice,” and Niccolo Machiavelli’s political philosophy demonstrate that an intellectual
rationale existed for early modern Italian social hierarchies as reinforced by codes of honor,
notions of privilege, perceptions of order and realities of power. Dennis Romano has argued that
in the hierarchically ordered world of sixteenth-century Venice, as the efficiency of the state’s
coercive power grew, conflict between individuals in unequal relationships conformed to
culturally constructed notions of privilege, order, and codes of honor.93 Jacopo Coppa almost
certainly encountered such realities.
Perhaps he just did not pay enough money. Forking over cash for the privilege of doing
business, greasing powerful palms, and sharing one’s income with social superiors seems to have
typified public commerce in early modern Venice. One thing is certain: the licensing and
regulation of commercial activity in the Venetian medical marketplace did not proceed from
purely medical considerations. Even a close reading of statutory law reveals otherwise.
Larger case studies, anecdotes, and stories reconstructed from surviving letters also
reveal much about the history of licensing and patenting within the Venetian Republic. David
Chambers and Brian Pullan have pieced together the tale of a Jewish physician attempting to
93
Romano, Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 239. See also Romano, Patricians
and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State.
333
gain a license to practice medicine in Venice during the year 1589.94 The story of David de
Pomis, a Jew who claimed to “hold doctorates in medicine and philosophy for more than forty
years,” has been reconstructed through the discovery of a formal dispatch of an Archbishop to
Pope Sixtus V, and a corresponding letter written by de Pomis to the His Holiness. Again, the
tale implies that the legal regulation of healing had more to do with sociological phenomena and
political culture than purely medicinal considerations.
“I know David de Pomis by name,” wrote Archbishop Matteucci to Pope Sixtus V, on
February 4, 1589. “Although a Jew,” explained the Archbishop, “he has the reputation of being a
good man.” Matteucci described how several leading senators of the Collegio approached him
during a recent ‘Festival of the Purification.’ They urged him to grant licenses to two Jewish
physicians to practice medicine in the Venetian Republic. “When I explained that I had no
authority to do so, they pressed me, in a way that brooked no refusal, to obtain one for them from
the Pope himself.” Impressed by the testimony of these senators, Matteuci decided to write Pope
Sixtus on behalf of David de Pomis.95
Might the phrase “they pressed me, in a way that brooked no refusal,” actually imply
some form of graft, coercion, or enticing attempt at persuasion? Perhaps, but it is difficult to say.
What is clear is that Matteuci’s letter neglects the professional qualifications, technical skills,
and styles of medicinal practice associated with the applicants. Instead, Matteuci emphasizes that
de Pomis has “dedicated some work to the Doge in the past,” and “would attend to the senators
and their families.” Similarly, de Pomis’s personal letter to the Pope ignores questions of medical
skill and healing potential. Instead, the Jewish physician speaks of the lexicon he has dedicated
94
Chambers, and Pullan, eds., Venice, A Documentary History, 340-41.
Ibid., 340, “From a dispatch of the papal nuncio, Archbishop Mantteucci, 4 February 1589: ASVat. DN, filza 26,
f. 477.”
95
334
to the Pope and his willingness to attend to Venetian citizens during times of epidemics, as a
service to the state, without any reward, if necessary. Although he specifically requests a license
to practice medicine, de Pomis speaks of his writing skills as a potential resource for the
Venetian government.96
No records exist regarding the outcome of this story. But the nature of the petitions
described above reveals something about the mediation and negotiation of legal authority
concerning medical matters in late Renaissance Venice. De Pomis’s Jewish background
represented the greatest obstacle to his desire to practice medicine within the Republic. His
subservience and willingness to assist his social superiors in whatever form necessary, he seemed
to think, represented his greatest assets. The medicinal solutions he perfected, the cures he
prescribed, and the healing practices he mastered had no place in his quest for legitimacy.
*
*
*
*
*
In writing histories derived from statutory law and legal regulations regarding medical
practice, historians of medicine produce stories determined by the limits of their sources. If not
careful, scholars of medical history may come to assume that their consultations of legal records
and judicial process somehow produce an image of social practice within the medical
marketplace. But in early modern Europe, the legal regulation of medical practice represented an
attempt on the part of states to participate in those healing activities significant enough to
warrant attention. State intervention generally constituted a modest influence on the sum total of
all healing-related activities.
96
Ibid., 341, “Petition of the Jew David de Pomis to Pope Sixtus V, 1 July 1589: ASVat. DN, filza 28, f. 282.”
335
It is anachronistic to believe early modern states closely policed healing practices with
rigorous efficiency across the social scale. The bureaucratic and administrative capacity of states
to reach every nook and cranny of social life was still several centuries in the future. Given the
limits of early modern legal authority and the inefficient regulation of social practices at the
everyday level, it is reasonable to assume that in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice,
virtually everybody enjoyed a realistic, if not a legal, freedom to medically treat a willing patient.
As a result, a wide variety of healing phenomena ensued. Medicinal recipes totally
foreign to the officially recognized pharmacological tradition changed hands in the marketplace.
Healing formulas that were technically “illegal,” or simply not recognized as legitimate, were
printed and sold every day. The boundaries between official, irregular, learned, amateur,
physician, surgeon, charlatan, mountebank, and quack were constantly blurred when sick people
sought cures for illness.
336
Conclusion
The Secrets of Health: Early Modern Views on Healing
The first recorded successful Caesarean section performed on a living mother occurred
over five hundred years ago. The woman, who went on to have more children, lived to the age of
seventy-seven. The surgeon, Swiss born Jakob Nufer, returned to his profession of castrating
farm animals. The pig-gelding Nufer never undertook scholarly medical training.1
Understanding this event requires appreciating two fundamental ideas: a) the vast
majority of early modern medical phenomena took place beyond the parameters of learned, or
officially sanctioned practice, and b) ideas and skills associated with fundamental aspects of
medicine and healing developed considerably on virtually every level of the early modern social
scale.
During the Renaissance, a fundamental level of medical knowledge and familiarity with
basic healing principles represented a necessity for everyday life among ordinary people.
Because medicine had yet to become thoroughly professionalized and because no adequate cadre
of learned practitioners efficiently reached the various levels and far flung corners of early
modern society, most people had to fend for themselves. Regarding early modern England, John
Henry suggests, “the conviction that everyone was responsible for their own health
[dominated].” According to Henry, “before medicine was established as the specialist preserve of
a professional elite…a knowledge of medicine was regarded as an important element in the
make-up of a cultured gentleman or gentlewoman. Lower down the social scale, a basic level of
1
See Henry, "Doctors and Healers: Popular Culture and the Medical Profession,” 197, and Connor, A People’s
History of Science, Miners, Midwives, and “Low Mechanicks,” 312. The operation took place in 1500.
337
medical knowledge was regarded as essential for daily life.”2 The same held true for northern
Italy, where the vast majority of sick folks rarely consulted officially licensed practitioners
during bouts with illness.3
Jacob Nufer’s successful Caesarian section surgery constituted a remarkable
achievement, but there was nothing miraculous about the context in which his feat emerged. The
vast majority of early modern children were born without the aid of university-trained doctors.
Scholarly practitioners had no realistic opportunity to compete with vernacular healers and
ordinary citizens for the conquests and triumphs of technical innovation and medical
breakthroughs. University-trained physicians were outnumbered, outflanked, and overwhelmed
by the competition of amateur healers everywhere.
Amateur practitioners, rather than scholarly physicians, typically suited the needs of most
early modern folks. Vernacular healers and their patients sought cures that promised immediate
relief for specific problems. The broad, imprecise remedies of Galenic medicine designed to
restore humoural balance or comprehensive regimens of health, which required long term
alterations in lifestyle for effectiveness, did not necessarily suit ordinary folks suffering from
gout, dropsy, or hemorrhoids. Not surprisingly, medical practitioners on the margins of academic
society, sought to bridge the gap between theory and practice implicit within university
2
Henry, "Doctors and Healers: Popular Culture and the Medical Profession,"199.
If recent research indicates that Renaissance Europe featured a relatively high percentage of medical practitioners
per citizen, it is mainly because the newly appreciated healers were not learned physicians. A 1630 Tuscan census
indicates a Florentine population of 86,000, which featured only 33 licensed physicians (see Cipolla, Public Health
& the Medical Profession, 80). In 1427 the total number of official physicians and licensed surgeons combined in
the Florentine tax registry numbered only thirty-six (see Siraisi, Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine, 25, and
also Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 115, 122, and 125). During the sixteenth century, 603
advanced degrees in medicine were granted within the Venetian Republic (see Trebbi, “Le professioni liberali, i
medici e i chirughi,” 475). But that only represents approximately six per year, for a city whose population generally
fell between 120,000 and 150,000 during the sixteenth century. Lindemann estimates that there were only 400
licensed physicians in all of France in 1520. By 1650 the figure rose to approximately 1,750, but most of these
doctors resided in the university towns of Paris, Montpellier, and Lyons, leaving the rural folks without professional
medical care. Sixteenth-century England featured similar demographic breakdowns and comparable ratios of
licensed physicians to citizens (see Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, 197).
3
338
medicine. Even official medicine often sought to simplify the ideational components of its own
foundation during practical application; let us recall the minimalization of scholarly astrology by
medical philosophers in manifestations of late Renaissance bloodletting.
Nevertheless, we have seen that healers outside university did not necessarily represent
poor imitations of their more learned competition. Many vernacular healers seemed more
influenced by ‘natural magic,’ ‘alchemical theory,’ or ‘hermetic philosophy’ than classic
humoural theory. As a result, the distinction between and relationship among scholarly
physicians and vernacular healers remains a loaded question. The post-war expansion of
‘traditional histories of medicine’ into modern ‘histories of healing’ has added to the controversy
among scholars in the field.
For these reasons, when contemplating how people of the early modern period dealt with
illness, one’s research may easily develop two heads. On the one hand, one may be seduced into
thinking about the history of medicine as an intellectual discipline. On the other hand, one may
gravitate towards stories about how most early modern people actually pursued health care.
Maintaining a well-ordered investigation requires an unusual combination of analysis,
contextualization, and synthesis.
I have grappled with this challenge throughout this dissertation. In my conclusion, while
summarizing the major themes of this paper and offering recommendations for future research, I
shall advance some final thoughts on this subject. I believe an unspoken assumption exists at the
forefront of most historical investigations into early modern healing. Scholars assume that the
closer they look at early modern medical practitioners, the more they will appreciate the
distinguishing characteristics that separate and define the various healers. But I think if we
approach our sources differently and listen more closely, we shall find profound similarities exist
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among healers from a wide variety of social levels within early modern Venice and the larger
continent of Europe. The main reason, I shall suggest, is that most perceptions of the body and
healing practices were intuitively derived, and subsequently dressed up in various styles of
discursive language and cultural convention.
*
*
*
*
*
The sets of discursive practices and styles of knowledge production we know as ‘science’
constitute relatively new things. Modern scientific methods, with their emphasis on
experimentation, rigorous methodology, time-tested models for establishing conclusions, and
ever advancing technology, represent fairly recent phenomena. But before the gravity chambers,
atom smashers, halogen microscopes, and centrifuge technology, inquiries about physical
phenomena and the natural world were more purely intellectual endeavors. Similarly, before
mercury thermometers, stethoscopes, x-ray machines, and magnetic resonance imaging
technology, perceptions of the body, health, sickness, and healing were largely derived through
intellectual debate, intuitive thought, common sense, instinct, and imagination. Hippocrates and
his followers could not literally see the chemical reactions of digestion, nor understand precisely
how drugs affected the body. The humoural model of the body represents the product of
philosophical discourse, but it is also speculative, conjectural, and intuitively derived.
Hippocrates did not discover humours. He invented them.
The point here is that pre-modern views of the body, health, and healing were not
necessarily gleaned via direct investigation of the body itself. Instead, pre-modern perceptions of
the body were shaped by ideas within larger narratives about other questions. As a subset of
natural philosophy, Hippocratic theory corresponded to the orientation, logic, and poetics of a
discourse not essentially corporeal. In fact, humoural philosophy corresponded to historical ideas
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about the physical world. Humoural theory and the microcosm/macrocosm view of the
relationship between the body and the cosmos grew up together. Renaissance perceptions of
sickness and disease were viewed as dysfunctions between human bodies and the natural word,
which constituted, in a sense, transgressions against nature itself. Given the wide variety of
forces exerting influence upon Hippocratic theory, from its original conception down through its
appropriation by competing scholars during the late Renaissance, it is not difficult to understand
the constant evolution of this body of knowledge.
In the early centuries of humoural philosophy, Galen used Aristotelian logic, or at least
second century manifestations of such, to elaborate, develop, systematize, and arguably, enhance
Hippocratic teaching. Galen combined ancient ideas about the body and health, to produce new
knowledge. But the new knowledge represented products of Aristotelian logic, not conclusions
drawn from Hippocrates’s systematic observation and empirical testing of the human body.
In this sense, humoural theory has always been influenced by a great deal of “external
thought,” or sets of ideas outside purely corporeal and physiological considerations. In fact, a
great deal of moralizing resides within pre-modern regimens of health. Good health depended
upon the moderation of passions and emotions, the restraint of orientations toward pleasure, the
control of lust and sexual impulses—in short, a form of mental discipline characterized by the
policing of human desire.
Moderation, balance and harmony represented the crucial virtues in the system of logic
and philosophy that was humoural theory. Each humour possessed a color, flavor, and character,
yet survival of the larger system depended upon humoural harmony. The same principles held
true for the relationship between individuals and social collectives. Humoural theory represented
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a collection of ideas human beings told themselves about themselves. Its major precepts were
derived by looking outward and upward, not inward.
Over the centuries, as I have argued in my first two chapters, humoural theory would be
transformed by a wide variety of external forces. Reconciliation and development with
‘Aristotelianism’ changed humoural theory. Exportation to foreign lands changed humoural
theory. The linguistic translation, appropriation, augmentation and synthesis with Indian,
Egyptian, and Chinese learning, at the hands of scholars from the Arabic east, transformed
ancient western philosophy. More alterations ensued upon humoural theory’s rediscovery by
western European scholars during the Medeival period. The Christianization of pagan logic and
subsequent institutionalization of humoural theory in European universities meant more change
for this rather malleable set of ideas.
In my second chapter, I compared humoural theory to the topsoil of a fertile field,
repeatedly tilled, used, replenished, and abused evermore. I chose the analogy for its broad basis
of appeal. The physical landscape always presents great potential for producing meaning. The
mountains, valleys, plains and forests, the oceans and the sky, represent the ultimate building
blocks of language and thought. Hippocrates had the same idea when he compared himself to the
cosmos, as others surely did before him.
Humoural theory owed its long life to an intuitively plausible, commonsensical nature.
Many of its most basic tenets were self-evident. Many of its most fundamental principles were
reinforced in a wide variety of human activity. A model calling for moderation in all things; a
regimen predicated on avoiding exhaustion, overeating, inebriation; a mentality characterized by
composure and reason—the basic pillars of humoural theory would seem beyond reproach. The
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model’s basic principles surely occurred to most people, or at least struck most pre-modern
citizens as reasonable.
Humoural theory provided a physical basis for understanding vice as a cause of sickness.
Humoural theory taught that domination by any one character, ingredient, or principle within a
group of equals brought dysfunction. Humoural theory implied that in order for an entity
composed of individual parts to survive, the parts must cooperate and interact harmoniously.
Humoural theory implied that all those things we cannot necessarily see, yet utterly depend upon,
conform to natural, divine law.
Galen once wrote, “health consists in natural activities, illness consists in unnatural ones;
health consists in the natural conditions, illness consists in the unnatural conditions; health
consists in the dispositions, and illness consists in them too.” For Galen, health depended upon a
lifestyle, frame of mind, and set of physical activities, including diet, most closely related to and
efficiently aligned with the harmony of nature. The strategic manipulation of the body, whether
in the form of surgical intervention or the use of foreign substances, aroused suspicion among
many humoural theorists. Today, people espousing such views of the body, health, sickness, and
healing may be said to possess a ‘naturalist’ view of medicine. The anti-modernism implicit in
such views calls for a return to the pristine days before chemical drugs, authoritarian approaches
to correcting and controlling the body, and a strong willingness towards invasive surgery and
physical intervention. Modern medical naturalists seek a return to yesteryear; humoural medicine
was conceived before modernity.
But the intuitive plausibility of humoural theory is best illustrated by the fact that the
model’s basic principles were held by people separated by vast spans of space, time, and cultural
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background. This point constitutes a critical idea within this dissertation and merits further
attention.
*
*
*
*
*
Why did so many basic principles related to healing gain expression in similar ways at a
variety of social levels within early modern society? The question may be extended to
philosophical discourse on nature, which, as we have seen, must never be separated from views
of the body, health, sickness, and healing during the Renaissance. Why do a plethora of views
regarding nature, heaven, the cosmos, and the human body emerge in eerily similar fashion
among people from widely different backgrounds?
Indeed, we have seen that even ways of thinking about these questions share common
characteristics among people separated by vast spans of space, time, and cultural context. The
Hermetic tradition’s restrictive ‘law of silence’ regarding the dissemination of knowledge about
the natural world serves as an example. According to legend, Asclepius, the Greek god of
medicine, warned his students not to “reveal the secrets of any profane person who is a stranger
to our art,” lest the secrets lose their power. Eighteen centuries later, Isabella Cortese spoke for
countless amateur natural philosophers when she echoed those remarks. “You must maintain the
secrets of your work,” wrote Cortese, “[and] do not teach these arts to anyone, [for] revealing
these secrets will force them to lose their efficacy.” At one time or another, Leonardo Fioravanti,
Girolamo Ruscelli, and Giambattista Della Porta echoed similar sentiments. Cortese had read
such things in the literature of earlier masters like Ramon Lull, John of Rupescissa, and Arnald
of Vilanova. She had studied, in fact, in a variety of languages that most sixteenth-century
vernacular healers would never know. Yet at the trials of the Venetian Inquisition, one hears
similar testimony regarding the value of secrecy from half-blind, semi-literate, elderly women.
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Notions regarding the discretion necessary to preserve the efficacy of special knowledge
emerged at a variety of social levels within early modern Europe. Closely related to these ideas
remained questions concerning legitimate objects of inquiry. What could man consider? What
should man consider? When did scientific inquiry cross the line of holy propriety? Again, we
find an amazing set of similarities among perspectives on these questions from very different sets
of people.
Since the earliest days of Christianity, theologians characterized ‘curiosity’ as a vice. We
should not be surprised that Augustine, Aquinas, and Tomasso Garzoni all warned against
unnecessary investigation into the mysteries of God’s providence in the eighth, thirteenth, and
sixteenth centuries respectively; these were all men of the cloth. But highly unorthodox
Christians held similar ideas. Despite his conviction regarding the vast healing potential hidden
within the natural world, Paracelsus never advocated unrestrained curiosity. Instead, the
sixteenth-century alchemical healer spoke of forces that “were too wonderful to ever be
thoroughly investigated.” The scholarly trained Levinus Leminus also believed the largely
unexamined physical world represented the key to improving the art of medicine. But in De
Miraculis occultis, the Dutch-born medical philosopher warns of excessive curiosity and the
vices of misguided investigation into nature, the physical world, and God’s creation.4
Perhaps Lemnius’s association with the University of Padua influenced his views on this
subject. After all, his Paduan colleague Andreas Vesalius expressed similar concerns about
‘curiositas,’ and Vesalius’s empirically driven anatomical program depended upon an
investigative disposition. Both men operated under the constraints established by Aquinas during
the thirteenth century. But Paduan protocol does not explain the common concerns and shared
sensibilities among people outside university.
4
Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature in Four Books, originally published in 1572. See bk. 4, sec. 33, 351-352.
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Neither Paracelsus nor Isabella Cortese ever expressed sympathy for scholastic teaching
or university-based medicine. Both complained that reverence for ancient teaching and
traditional learning limited the art of healing. These thinkers would not explain their views
regarding the limits of legitimate inquiry in Paduan terms. Nor would sixteenth-century healer
Elena Crusichi.
Like many of the semi-literate, vernacular healers of the north Italian countryside,
Crusichi dismissed questions about the metaphysical nature of her cures as inappropriate. Under
interrogation, she politely reminded Inquisitors about the “mysteries of God and faith.” When
asked how and why her prescriptions actually worked, Crusichi scolded her interrogators by
reminding them of her trademark motto: “It is in the name of Christ, the glorious Virgin Mary
and the Holy Trinity that the Lord is the one who liberates [victims] from disease.”5 Although
they could vividly describe the material basses of their cures with pride, vernacular healers like
Crusichi and Giovanna Semolina preferred Christian mystery and divine inscrutability to purely
rational metaphysics.
Perhaps Crusichi deliberately related her stories in Christian terms to avoid the wrath of
her interrogators. Or perhaps notions regarding the limits of proper inquiry occurred to her
intuitively. In the history of healing, not all ideas were formally transmitted via direct instruction,
research, and reading. Most of the basic ones, in fact, seem to have been intuitively derived by
wide varieties of people, owing to the sheer plausibility of such ideas. The best example is the
micro/macrocosm view of the human body’s relationship with the cosmos. This view also
represents a set of ideas seemingly shared by healers at every level of early modern Italian
society.
5
A.S.V., Sant’Ufficio, Busta 30, August, 1571, fol. 3r.
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*
*
*
*
*
Hippocrates suggested that understanding man represented the key to understanding
nature and the universe. As we have seen, a wide variety of learned western thought, before and
after Hippocrates, subscribed to the same general principles. Hermetic, Platonic, Aristotelian,
Neo-Platonic, and Galenic appropriation of Hippocratic teaching all engaged the
micro/macrocosm idea.
Twenty centuries after Hippocrates, Isabella Cortese espoused her view of the
relationship between man and the cosmos. “For man and nature are united,” she wrote, while
emphasizing the significance of this relationship in the context of healing. “I want you to
understand [this principle] not in the way philosophers have taught, or perhaps in a way they do
not understand.” Cortese believed God created man in his own image, but He also created the
world in His own image and imparted the image of the world into man and vice-versa. Cortese’s
view resembled that of Paracelsus, but differed significantly from the scholarly Neo-Platonic
philosophers or students of classical western astrology. Simply put, Cortese rejected the classical
neo-Platonic principle which held that man and the cosmos were composed of the same
elements; hence, the spirits that influenced the cosmos must simultaneously influence man.
The point is, Isabella Cortese held a view of the micro/macrocosm principle, but her view
differed from many of the previous articulations of the general idea. Cortese’s view was
probably comparable to, but different from, the view of Elena Crusichi, who used the spirit
within the tides to wash a body’s sickness back out to sea. Crusichi’s sense of the correlation
between the physical world and the body probably did not surprise her fellow inhabitants of the
north Italian countryside. In discussing ordinary folks at the everyday level of early modern life,
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Mary Lindemann suggests that “people thought about the inner workings of the body, to be sure,
but more often they spoke about balances and sympathies, weighed the relationship of one
humour to another, one organ to another, and related the entire human microcosm to the larger
macrocosm of the universe.”6 As Lindemann rightly concludes, “what went on inside the body
was hard to discern and the ways people referred to bodily processes tended to be metaphoric.”7
I have attempted to demonstrate subtle differences in general views held by people from
very different backgrounds. People acquired ideas from various sources and made use of
knowledge in different ways. For many years, historians, folklorists, morphologists, and
anthropologists have debated the implications of common thought held by people separated by
vast spans of time and space.8 Does the discovery of an underlying structure common to ideas
regarding the relationship between the human body and the heavenly cosmos imply derivation
from a single source? Can the cultural transmission, whether written or oral, of common ideas
and sets of practices across vast territories over centuries be persuasively demonstrated? Can a
broad substratum of common beliefs about the body, health, and healing emerge and endure
coincidentally? Carlo Ginzburg suggests that when we encounter conspicuously common
elements of thought regarding specific ideas, such as rituals to cure illness or battle demons,
among people separated by huge tracts of space and time, we should consider four alternatives:
“the analogies that exist may be attributed to (1) chance, (2) the necessity imposed by mental
structures common to the human experience, (3) diffusion, or (4) a common genetic source.”9 I
will be satisfied to suggest that various manifestations of the micro/macrocosm idea naturally
6
Lindemann, Medicine and Society, 15. Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter suggest the same idea was especially true for
early modern English people. See Porter and Porter, In Sickness and in Health, 46.
7
Ibid., 15.
8
For example, see Propp, Morphology of the Folktale; Murray, The Witch Cult in Western Europe; and the
following works of Carlo Ginzburg: The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults; “Deciphering the Sabbath,”
and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath.
9
Ginzburg, “Deciphering the Sabbath,” 128.
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occurred to different people separated by vast spans of space and time, owing to its intuitive
plausibility. As Ginzburg suggests, “research in this direction will have to make use of less
rudimentary means of interpretation and analytical categories than those so far employed.”10 In
other words, we have to be willing to make reasonable assumptions.
Indeed, it would be unreasonable not to conclude that comparable ideas regarding health
and healing occurred to wide varieties of different people. Let us consider a basic principle we
have encountered throughout this dissertation: the view that nature provided the remedies to cure
all illnesses affecting humanity; the physical world, so the story goes, represents a great
warehouse of potential healing ingredients. We have seen how ancient writers on materia
medica, medical botanists at university, alchemical healers of the Paracelsian brand, and a wide
variety of vernacular healers throughout northern Italy and continental Europe held this view.
Andrew Wear suggests this idea resided at the heart of most vernacular therapeutics in early
modern England. “The whole of the natural world seemed to comprise a vast repository of
remedies,” Wear states. For evidence, Wear points to scriptural sources. “Scripture gave
credence to the Greek and Arabic use of nature for remedies, for as Ecclesiasticus 38:4 put it,
‘The Lord hath created medicines of the earth, and hee that is wise will not aborre them.’” For
Wear, the idea represents a foundational principle of scholarly and vernacular medicine.11
But where else, if not the physical world, would remedies for illness come from? Must
we search for literary sources, evidence of oral transmission, or signs of historically specific
practices, to prove that the people of the past possessed common sense? Furthermore, may we
not assume that comparable forms of common sense existed among people at a wide variety of
social levels?
10
11
Ibid., 135.
Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, chap. 4, “Remedies.”
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As a discursive formation, humoural theory had not been conceived via rigorous
investigation with specific tools particular to an exclusive niche within society. It had been
conceived and developed by collective rationalization, debate, consensus, and imagination. As an
explanatory set of ideas, humoural theory sought to describe, rationalize, and justify. It drew
from a wide variety of ideas readily accessible to most people. Its basic principles and
operational virtues were commonsensical.
Until fairly recently in human history, most views on health and healing were largely
derived through intuition and imagination. Prior to modern science, the vast majority of
knowledge about health and sickness were constructed with qualities and activities available to
everyone. Common forms of empirically derived knowledge existed at a wide variety of social
levels, even if different forms of discursive language and cultural convention camouflaged such
things. The Augustinian priest and scientist Gregor Mendel is credited with inventing genetics.
But is it not reasonable to believe agrarian peasants were strategically pairing off farm animals
long before Mendel’s highly intellectualized articulation of such ideas?
*
*
*
*
*
Most of the issues and challenges facing historians raised in this dissertation can be
summoned forth with two basic questions: a) how do historians organize their knowledge and
ideas about the various types of medical practitioners during the Renaissance? and b) how can
historians meaningfully analyze the production of an early modern medical publication? The first
question might be rephrased as follows: how do historians conceptualize the various healers of
the early modern period? If one broadly divides early modern healers into two camps—scholarly
university graduates, or “rational doctors,” on the one hand and amateur, vernacular healers, or
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“empirics,” on the other hand, there shall be direct consequences for the analysis that follows
from such a division. In other words, how we conceptualize the healers of the past determines
how we organize and make sense of the knowledge and ideas gleaned during our research and
investigation of yesteryear’s medical practitioners. The second question concerns rhetoric and
the challenge of interpreting texts. Put most simply, the question might be rephrased as follows:
how can we understand the relationship between text and context? A sixteenth-century volume
published by a medical author constitutes a document with which to study early modern healing.
But naïve readings of rhetorical publications, as though such books offer clear windows into the
past or represent solid historical documentation suitable for non-critical interpretation, will do
more harm than good. For the challenges of developing a hermeneutic style suitable for
analyzing Renaissance medical publications, historians may look to the discipline of literary
criticism, as I shall explain below.
New theoretical approaches to understanding the relationship between text and context, in
fact, can draw both questions raised above into a fairly singular, potentially interesting
consideration. The question of text and context can refer to a medical author’s relationship with,
and production of, the text he or she publishes. In considering each volume, historians should
ask: Why did the author write the book? How is the writer attempting to advance his professional
interests with this volume? Was the author trying to fit within a certain niche of the medical
arena or make a name for himself by attacking an established school of thought? How did the
culture of medical publishing shape, mold, define, or constrain the scope, nature, and style of the
book?
These questions shall be directly influenced by the general perception of the larger
medical landscape the historian brings to the archive. If the historian thinks himself to be
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examining the overly unified stable ground of reality known as the “Age of Humoural Theory,”
or the nice, neat phase of medical evolution known as the “Era of Experimentation,” the
historian’s perception of the text shall be immediately saturated with particular meaning. Even
choosing to study “the period in which Empiricism replaced Scholasticism” encourages a scholar
to mentally deposit a text into one of a precious few tidy interpretative compartments.
A post-structuralist view of the medical landscape, however, which seeks out the various
range of certain discursive activities, considers how knowledge intersects with class, examines
the social and anthropological roots of all knowledge production, and resists oversimplified,
reductionist views of shared mentalities, would enrich considerations of every question raised in
the paragraphs above. What might be called constant “intertextual readings” of the author’s
relationship with the text, the text’s relationship with the context, the tension of conflicting ideas
within the text, and the historian’s perception of the past, would help emancipate historical
investigations from the constraining style of dichotomous analysis and bi-polar thinking
currently dominating studies of early modern medicine.12
Post-structural theory and literary approaches to historical research may promise
expanding conceptions of historical reality and meaning, but they can be difficult to implement.
In discussing the possibility of linking literary and historical studies, Albert Ascoli remarked, “It
is generally more easy to theorize the desirability of such interdisciplinarity than it is to put it
into persuasive practice, since its broadly synthetic objects and aims invariably call for a wider
range of scholarly methods and interpretative strategies than any single discipline-based study
12
These ideas, which shall be further explained below, are most directly influenced by the scholarship of Hayden White,
Dominick LaCapra, Lloyd Kramer, and, of course, indirectly informed by the intellectual legacy of Friedrich Nietzche and
Michel Foucault. A more detailed bibliography shall follow. One fairly concise discussion of most of the thoughts described
above can be found in Kramer’s “Literature, Criticism and the Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White
and Dominick LaCapra,” 97-128.
352
has available, not to mention a far greater fund of plausible evidence.13 Nevertheless, historians
of early modern natural philosophy have already published books that can help point us toward
better studies of Renaissance medicine and healing.
*
*
*
*
*
In 1993, Mario Biagioli published Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Age
of Absolutism. In this work Biagioli develops a thesis regarding the major influences shaping
Galileo’s thought, publications and professional behavior. Biagioli sets out to explain the essence
of what he calls Galileo’s “socioprofessional identity.”
Biagioli’s main argument can be summarized as follows: the demands of patronage
society and the behavior necessary to advance in the culture of absolutism directed Galileo’s
thought, shaped his work, and governed his behavior. The production of Galileo’s natural
philosophy and his cultivation of court employment emerged simultaneously; Galilean science
cannot be understood without strong emphasis on the political considerations Galileo believed
necessary to advance his career. For example, according to Biagioli, Galileo’s reputation as a
controversialist cannot be assigned to any particular psychological disposition or crucial
discovery within the sixteenth-century Tuscan’s personal research. Instead, the fact that Galileo
knew that his duty as court philosopher would be to attract interesting challenges from respected
counterparts in other courts, and to arrange entertaining public disputes, strongly influenced
Galileo’s proclivity for raising controversial questions. According to Biagioli, the cultural
dynamics of career advancement in patronage societies did not represent one aspect among many
13
See Ascoli’s review of John J. Najemy’s Between Friends: Discourse of Power and Desire in the MachiavelliVettori Letters of 1513-1515.
353
in Galileo’s mind; strategies and considerations of advancement constituted the essential forces
driving Galileo’s behavior, and, ultimately, the construction of his natural philosophy.
“The unremitting focus on patronage as the shaper of scientific careers and scientific
knowledge is the provocative strength of Biagioli’s study,” remarked colleague Steven Shapin.14
I would recommend historians of early modern European medicine approach their work with
similar focus. If we consider natural philosophy at the highest levels of early modern European
society, we find that perceptions of truth and reality, whether derived via scholastic logic,
empiricism, experimentation, or gleaned from a tarot reader’s cards, had to be effectively
attached to contours of power in order to have significant meaning. Politics meant more to the
construction of high scientific thought during the Renaissance than it does in modern Europe.
Neglecting the cultural dynamics of professional advancement within patronage society ignores a
crucial component, or arguably the essence, of Galileo’s mentality.
As discussed in this dissertation, historians have disagreed over Joseph Duchesne’s
Paracelsian tendencies, although the Frenchman’s generally subversive point of view regarding
university medicine cannot be denied. But how enriched might such inquiries be if they focused
on Duchesne’s desire to be premier physician in the house of Bourbon King Henry IV? How
much more insightful would our investigation of the sixteenth-century debate between Paduan
professor Giovanni Argenterio and humanist medical philosopher Klaus Tubingen on materia
medica be if we could piece together their respective ideas and strategies concerning professional
advancement? The same types of anthropologically driven inquiries could also be mapped onto
historical investigations of non-scholarly healers.15
14
Shapin, review of Biagioli’s Galileo Courtier, 505-507.
The introductions, prefaces, and acknowledgement sections of many non-scholarly early modern publications reveal much
about whom the author hopes to please.
15
354
Biagioli challenges us to see the early modern scientist in the same manner that social
historians of art and literature have encouraged us to see their subjects.16 Why should it be
inappropriate to attempt to understand Galileo in the same fashion and manner that historians of
art attempt to understand Michelangelo or historians of literature attempt to understand
Shakespeare? What makes it wrong to analyze the production of Galilean natural philosophy
with the same set of questions we might use to understand the production of Shakespearian
literature? Could it be that modern historians are reading some perception of the distinction
between science on the one hand, and art and literature on the other, back onto the early modern
period? Might modern scholars unconsciously, or perhaps consciously, think that literary and
artistic knowledge are somehow less valuable than scientific knowledge for comprehending the
world? Do we reserve positivistic rather than relativistic conceptions of historical knowledge for
the great men that gave us modern science?
In 1993, John Najemy’s Between Friends: Discourse of Power and Desire in the
Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513-1515 linked literary theory with historical reconstruction in
order to better understand the evolution of Niccolo Machiavelli’s political philosophy. With
close readings of a series of letters between Machiavelli and Francesco Vettori, Najemy
attempted to understand how the dialogue between these two men influenced the former’s style
of thinking, political analysis, and strategy for professional advancement. The book mainly
concerns the issues and challenges of interpreting texts.
In his introduction, Najemy addresses the problem of “impoverished critical readings”
among historians. In discussing the surviving letters between Machiavelli and Vettori, Najemy
complains that few historians have provided close readings and even fewer have considered the
significance of dialogue. “Historians of political thought,” explains Najemy, “have used the
16
Shapin makes this point in his review of Biagioli’s Galileo Courtier, 505-507.
355
letters somewhat selectively and with greater focus to locate the origins or to trace the
development of the political ideas that found their way into the major works.” But by “selective
reading,” Najemy meant that historians often separated important passages of texts from their
larger whole, reading them in deliberate isolation or associating them with other highly particular
passages culled from distant, seemingly unrelated letters. “If crucial passages are read in
isolation from their respective full texts, and if each letter is similarly read in isolation from the
dialogue of the ongoing correspondence between Machiavelli and Vettori, as they often are, they
can be made to yield meanings compatible with any number of larger interpretations of
Machiavelli.” Najemy warned of readers who deliberately hunted for bits and pieces of evidence
that might support overly simplistic arguments or partial interpretations. “Smart readers who
know what they are looking for will usually find it,” declared Najemy.17
Najemy’s analysis seems especially relevant for questions regarding the interpretation of
early modern medical texts. Every major medical text I have ever consulted—scholarly works
from medical professors, neo-scholarly works written in vernacular languages for larger
audiences, volumes from the “books of secrets” tradition, and itemized recipe books for
everyday use—all contain concrete ideas and pieces of information in some places that are
impossible to reconcile with ideas in other places. Indeed, if the various types of books on
healing published during the early modern era share one distinct characteristic, it is that within
each book there exists something for everyone. “Smart readers,” as Najemy might say, can find
Galenic assumptions in Paracelsian alchemical texts, elements of ‘sympathetic healing’ in
university text books, and elements of Aristotelian logic in vernacular recipe books. It is not
uncommon to find descriptions of “elixir,” or recipes for one solution that will cure any illness,
in books whose introductions strongly imply that no such thing exists.
17
Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire, Introduction, 4-5.
356
During the early modern period, as described in my first two chapters, medical schools
struggled to unambiguously divide theory from practice. Scholarly medical books published
during the late Renaissance reflect the tension between the theoretical and practical aspects of
medicine. Most texts were mainly philosophical works. Discussions of healing practices
followed the highly intellectualized narratives at the forefronts of the books. The introduction,
preface, and opening chapters of scholarly texts often outline a body of medical theory and
philosophy, while the rest of the book describes healing practices. Incredibly, to our modern
sensibilities, the balance of these books often describe sets of practices that are in no significant
way related to the theory with which the volume begins. In a sense, the medical philosophy
serves as an aesthetic rather than a binding set of principles. The discrepancy between the
general philosophy initiating a text and the sets of practices that followed became something of a
literary convention in scholarly medical books. Theory and practice represented two different
things.
Neo-scholarly books written for larger audiences contained similar fundamental
discrepancies, albeit for slightly different reasons. The literary culture of early modern natural
philosophy demanded that medical practitioners demonstrate reverence to the great authors of
antiquity at the outset of each work. Conforming to literary convention required authors to pay a
certain lip service to the famous thinkers dominating the field of medicine. The larger
manuscripts that followed generally strayed significantly from the superficial allusions which
opened each work. The books often began with a literary genuflection to some ancient thinker,
then quickly transformed into a simpler treatise designed for the non-specialist.
The “professors of secrets” wrote in a similarly paradoxical style. At the margins of
academic society, men like Girolamo Ruscelli, Leonardo Fioravanti, and Tommaso Bovio felt
357
compelled to kneel before the major power brokers of universities, publishing houses, heads of
state, patrons of academies, and benefactors of the arts. At the outset of their books, “i professori
de secreti” often professed profound admiration for the learning and insights of men they
subsequently ignored in the balance of their work.
By definition, the very nature of “i libri secreti” defied the order and internal consistency
that would later become synonymous with works of scientific literature. These books were
eclectic. The authors portrayed themselves as resourceful collectors that had traveled the world
over, accumulating remedies and formulas to solve every type of foreseeable problem. As a
result, they produced unwieldy compilations. The “books of secrets” reflect the nature and
disposition of their wide-eyed, ambitious authors; having outflanked their competitors, these
tireless men and women of the world set out to demonstrate the full range of their bag of tricks.
They made no pretense of issuing rigidly orthodox ideas that could be traced back to unifying
sets of foundational principles.
Each type of texts described above remains vulnerable to selective readings. As Najemy
says, “smart readers who know what they are looking for will usually find it.” Perhaps historians
have, as suggested a few paragraphs above, applied overly quantitative, positivistic, literal
interpretations to the texts left behind by the men and women credited with pioneering modern
science. To do so is, among other things, anachronistic. As a natural philosopher, Galileo
philosophized about nature, just as the political philosopher Machiavelli philosophized about
politics. Both men were artists. Galileo was not a modern scientist. To reserve modern scientific
approaches to interpretation and comprehension for Galileo’s work is to fundamentally
misunderstand the early modern period.
But I do not think that is the main problem with histories of early modern natural
358
philosophy. I believe the real problem is that the modern historian is not listening closely
enough. Most published interpretations of the dozens of texts described above lack the quality of
criticism necessary to derive insightful meaning from debates among early modern natural
philosophers.
*
*
*
*
*
John Najemy’s Between Friends, Discourses of Power and Desire in the MachiavelliVettori Letters of 1513-1515 offers great insights with regards to the dilemmas of historical
theorizing described above. Najemy provides a standard of criticism for modern readings of
Renaissance texts. With his emphasis on “intertextual analysis” Najemy constantly rethinks the
relationship between language and thought, the influence of the dialogue between two men on
what each man writes, the impact that contemporary (1513-1515) events have on their writing,
the meaning of seeming paradox and contradiction within the letters, and the ambition of
Machiavelli, among other things, while he engaged Vettori (“Machiavelli was quickly and
confidently forging the terms of his new vocation as a political theorist”). Simply put, Najemy
reads the text like a literary critic.
In his review of Najemy’s book, Albert R. Ascoli acknowledges that “historians tend to
give notoriously literal and selective accounts of written texts, ignoring the complex formal and
literary-historical elements—generic, narrative, figurative, and so on—through which their
meanings are shaped.18 Similarly, Dominick LaCapra expressed hope that “perhaps greater
attention to the way that literary critics and philosophers read great texts would challenge the
modern historian’s desire to “reduce certain texts to representative, illustrative, or symptomatic
18
See Ascoli’s review of Najemy’s Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire.
359
functions.”19 What Lloyd Kramer calls the “reductive reading style” of modern social historians I
am content to label the “naïve reading style,” in that modern scholars often take the voices of the
past at their word. LaCapra’s choice of words—“the modern historian’s desire to reduce certain
texts to representative functions”—implies a conscious effort by the modern scholar to facilitate
his research by professing to have located hard evidence. In any case, Kramer, LaCapra, and I
myself all refer to poor critical readings of historical texts. Paraphrasing LaCapra, Kramer
writes:
In contrast to the reductive reading style of social history, LaCapra urges historians
to read historical texts and contexts in ways that recognize their complexity and that
might lead to new kinds of writing too, since the style one adopts in writing is
connected with the style one adopts in reading.20
With regards to the texts I have been discussing, the short form of this advice would be to
simply acknowledge early modern texts as rhetorical constructions; read them critically;
constantly consider the motives of the writer and the ideological perspectives articulated; and
resist the temptation to reduce each text to the status of evidence of which it professes to be true.
In her book Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London: Patronage, Physicians and Irregular
Practitioners, 1550-1640, Margaret Pelling begins her analysis with testimony from two
scholarly physicians. As explained in Chapter 2, John Securis’s 1566 A Detection and
Querimonie of the Daily Enormities and Abuses Committed in Physick blasted untrained,
irregular medical practitioners throughout London and suggested the same held true for Paris.
19
LaCapra, Rethinking Intellectual History, 24 and 344. Also, see Kramer’s “Literature, Criticism and the Historical
Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra,”especially 105-106.
20
Kramer, “Literature, Criticism and the Historical Imagination,” 106.
360
Securis blamed the gullibility and credulity of the London masses for allowing such fraudulent
activity to flourish. Supporting Securis’s testimony with like-minded words from John Hall
(another licensed physician) and manuscript records from London’s College of Physicians,
Pelling establishes a conceptual framework for her book, characterizing the world of early
modern London medical practice as a bi-polar struggle between university-trained physicians
and irregular healers.21
A critical reading of Securis’s book, which consistently analyzed the relationship
between text and context, would probably not allow Pelling to frame her work on such tenuous
grounds. Unfortunately, once Pelling has established her theoretical framework featuring
dichotomous categories of polar opposites, all subsequent evidence gleaned from archives will
likely be hammered into one of her two camps or simply ignored because her framework has not
the capacity to appreciate it. In 1931, Herbert Butterfield complained that many of his fellow
historians “tend in the first place to adopt a Whig or Protestant view of the subject, and very
quickly busy themselves with dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress.”22
Butterfield emphasized that the way scholars organize and arrange their historical knowledge at
the outset of inquiries will affect the way they theorize, think and write about history. This same
is still true today.
Of course, it is not difficult to understand why historians of early modern European
natural philosophy, especially healing, feel compelled to devise strong organizational
frameworks at the outset of their investigations. As I explained in the introduction to this
dissertation, framing consistent theoretical models and establishing meaningful historical criteria
21
Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London, 7-8. Again, also see Harkness’s soon-to-be-published essay,
“Sir John Lack-Latin, a Peddler, and a Presumptuous Woman: Situating Women’s Medical Experiences in
Elizabethan London,” 1. Also, see Harkness, The Jewel House, especially chap. 3, “The Contest over Medical
Authority: Valerie Russwurin and the Barber-Surgeons.”
22
Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, 5.
361
for understanding early modern European healing represents an enormous challenge. As virtually
all early modern people sought cures for illness and the basic issues of maintaining health
touched nearly every aspect of Renaissance life, scholars of medicine have always faced one
fundamental challenge: bringing order to a vast array of unwieldy phenomena. Desperately
trying to gain some form of organization at the outset of their inquiries, scholars feel compelled
to adopt methods of compartmentalization, distinguishing approaches to healing and styles of
medicinal practice in order to compare and contrast similarities and differences among healers.
As a result, images of early modern healers and styles of medical practice described by
contemporary historians have generally been defined in opposition to each other and
subsequently compared. Faced with the challenge of organizing inquiries into vast collections of
often similar yet crucially different styles of medical philosophy and sets of healing practices,
historians have felt compelled to divide and distinguish.
But these clear, neat, tidy organizational frameworks can lead to many a blind alley.
Inadequate readings of texts and insufficient appreciation of contexts have produced
impoverished analysis. Historians of medicine have read the present back onto the past and
imposed artificial distinctions on early modern healing activities that would be meaningless to
most sixteenth- and- seventeenth-century Europeans. When we read historical texts on medicine
and healing we consistently find them fraught with paradox, contradiction, and inconsistencies.
What do these tensions imply about the contexts they are supposed to reflect? Similarly, when
we read the critiques Renaissance medical philosophers and healers leveled at each other, we
notice most of the voices of the yesteryear seemed to be talking past each other. What does this
paradox imply about our understanding to the larger early modern context?
Dominick LaCapra would suggest resisting any reduction of historical reality during the
362
Renaissance to some notion of its essential or pretextual qualities. Mario Biagioli would suggest
we more seriously consider the professional ambitions and cultural context of the actors we
consider. Although neither LaCapra nor Biagioli study early modern medicine, both men, I
assume, would suggest that our analysis of texts and our reconstruction of context will not
necessarily reveal truths about a relatively stable and unified reality in the past. We cannot
understand Renaissance perceptions of the body and healing the way our modern scientists
understand our bodies and our health concerns.
In fact, historians of early modern European medicine might do well to stop trying to
explain what happened—who influenced whom, when one medical philosophy gave way to
another, which bacillus caused bubonic plague—and simply try as best they can to render
interpretative descriptions of the past. Rather than pursuing the epistemological, metaphysical,
and ontological foundations of early modern thought, we might be better off investigating the
political control of knowledge and the diffusion and dissemination of ideas. We can never really
understand how Isabella Cortese gained her view of the relationship between the cosmos and the
body or what Elena Crusichi thought about the impact of the ocean’s tides on human health;
indeed, we cannot even agree if William Harvey and Andreas Vesalius were ‘Aristotelians,’ but
we can attempt to understand how the ideas and practices of historical actors were diffused,
disseminated, and received. Inquires into such questions would be more realistic, so long as we
emphasize the sociological aspects of our work and remember that histories of medicine concern
more than intellectual debate, philosophical discourse, and medically related phenomena.
Simply put, the history of early modern European medicine needs more anthropologically
driven research. As I suggested in my chapter on the policing and regulation of medicinal
commerce in early modern Europe, historians of medicine must remember that Renaissance
363
healing took place in historically influenced sociological contexts. In that chapter, I argued that
scholars studying the regulation and policing of early modern medicine failed to adequately
consider the social dynamics of patronage society. During the Renaissance, citizens from modest
levels of the social hierarchy, hoping to gain social mobility, typically found themselves at the
mercy of well positioned power brokers within the public sphere. If one wanted to do business,
one had to pay any of a number of pipers. Hence, analyses concerning the licensing of
apothecaries or the patenting of healing remedies cannot proceed from purely medicinal
considerations, as many of them do. In retrospect, I might have asked why the Venetian
Inquisition mainly targeted female healers while the Provedditori alla Sanita almost exclusively
licensed men to sell medicinal products. Such an investigation might have represented a social
and anthropologically driven inquiry about medical phenomena and healing activities without the
risks of anachronistically imposing a modern sense of order on the distant past.
Similarly, my chapter on the critiques of certain medical practitioners by other medical
practitioners attempted to expose the limits of bi-polar, dichotomous analysis, naïve readings of
rhetorical productions, and insufficient appreciation of cultural context, but more work needs to
be done in this area. I may have adequately emphasized that the medicalized culture wars
between men like Joubert and Mercurio on the one hand and Fioravanti and Ruscelli on the other
did not take place in vacuums most suitable for study by modern students of medical history. But
I would have liked to have further emphasized certain questions within Chapter 4.
The critiques of men like Joubert, Mercurio, and Securis were filled with righteous
vehemence. These men seemed to think vernacular healers represented the worst characters in
their respective societies. Joubert advanced his perception of ‘legitimate healers’ in high-minded
Biblical proverbs. Mercurio, James Primrose, and Cosimo Aldana associated vernacular healing
364
with the sacrilegious, diabolical black arts. Similarly, men like Leonardo Fioravanti, Levinus
Lemnius, and Girolamo Ruscelli hurled vituperative crtiques at their principle adversaries within
the field of healing. Fioravanti associated institutionalized medicine with organized crime and
charged its individual practitioners with theft and larceny.
I suggested that class-determined analysis cannot fully explain disputes among these
men. After all, Cornelius Agrippa, Francis Bacon, and Paracelsus all hailed from aristocratic
backgrounds or enjoyed wealth and privilege at various points in their lives, yet all three men
looked critically at scholarly medicine. Even our modern notions of wealth, privilege, and
university training do not necessarily fit the sixteenth century. Giambattista Della Porta, a rich
Neopolitan aristocrat, published prolifically in Latin for scholarly audiences. But Della Porta
never attained a university degree.
But why did Francis Bacon so viciously attack the eclectic compilation of ‘natural magic’
of Della Porta by comparing it to tricksters, clowns, and buffoons of circus acts and carnivals?
Why did Thomas Browne, James Primrose, and Cosimo Aldana focus so directly upon the
credulity and intellectual vulnerability of the masses? Why did men like Paracelsus, Fioravanti,
and Girolamo Ruscelli sound like religious crusaders hoping to cleanse morally bankrupt
societies?
Unfortunately, this dissertation does not provide answers to these questions. I hope to
have emphasized the idea that meaningful reflection on these issues should not focus upon the
conceptual and discursive languages of medicine, health, and healing. The clashes among these
men cannot be explained by professional differences within the art of medicine or natural
philosophy. The disputes and debates surveyed above emerged in socially and culturally
constructed worlds quite different from our own, where perceptions of legitimacy and the right to
365
do natural philosophy depended upon prejudices regarding the religion one practiced, the city of
one’s birth, the language one spoke, and a variety of other biases and preconceived notions about
the relative worth of people. But only further and deeper sociological analysis can thoroughly
explain such phenomena.
*
*
*
*
*
The major themes of this paper may be summarized in four paragraphs. In early modern
Venice, and, to a lesser extent, the larger European continent, healers from a wide variety of
social levels shared similar ideas and common assumptions about the body, health, sickness, and
healing. The main reason for these similarities is that ideas about such things were intuitively
derived, mentally plausible, and commonsensical; hence, they occurred to many different people.
Historians of medicine have imposed artificial distinctions upon early modern healing, dividing
medical practitioners, knowledge, and healing practices up into separate categories for their own
organizational needs. But these anachronistic distinctions would have little meaning for the vast
percentage of early modern European inhabitants.
Most histories of medicine and healing remain heavily influenced by perceptions of
scholarly, university-based medicine. This is due to the fact that scholarly medical practitioners
left the greatest amount of readily discernible evidence for historians to consult. But most early
modern Europeans consulted vernacular healers or pursued their own cures when suffering
illness. During the period considered in this dissertation, scholarly medicine suffered a discursive
crisis. Ironically, the major players in Renaissance universities—scholastics, humanists,
Galenists, Aristotelians, empiricists and maverick medical philosophers—engaged in many of
366
the same activities as modern historians of medicine: in a period of professional crisis
characterized by the expansion and fragmentation of their field, they investigated the past,
seeking information by which to affirm and secure their own scholarly positions at the expense
of others. Both then and now, the stories such people produce oversimplify the rich and complex
history of early modern medicine and pigeon-hole its practitioners into narrow stereotypes.
Early modern healing took place in social contexts and must be understood
sociologically. Many historians rely too heavily upon the purely medicinal aspects of healing
stories and fail to appreciate the social and cultural dynamics of the early modern societies in
which healing occurred. Anthropologically influenced history represents our best chance of
properly understanding early modern healing. Hermeneutical styles associated with modern
literary criticism represent the most desirable way of studying early modern medical
publications. What may be called “intertextual readings” of a medical author’s relationship with
the text he produces, the text’s relationship with the cultural context in which it emerged, the
tension of conflicting ideas within the text, and the historian’s anthropologically influenced
appreciation of the past, might help emancipate historical investigations from the constraining
style of dichotomous analysis and bi-polar thinking currently dominating studies of early modern
medicine.
Finally, the idea that most perceptions of the body and healing practices were intuitively
derived and subsequently dressed up in various styles of discursive language and cultural
convention, contains some important implications for historical writing on early modern Europe.
Perhaps it is wise, as Roger Chartier and Peter Burke suggest, to view broad bodies of
knowledge within early modern Europe as being held in common, but used differently, by all
levels of society. Such a view might reduce the historian’s tendency toward reductive thinking,
367
characterized by pre-conceived searches for distinguishing characteristics among historical
figures and social practices. John Henry suggests the medical hierarchies in most Renaissance
societies were more matters of social distinction than theoretical or intellectual division. In this
sense, it may be best to consider how knowledge intersects with social status rather than
searching for clues regarding the origin, circulation and transmission of ideas.
368
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John G. Visconti
Vita
EDUCATION
Bachelor of Arts
Fordham University
Rose Hill, Bronx, New York
8/79-5/83
Major: Political Science
Minor: History
G.P.A. 3.57
Certificate of Completion (non-accredited)
New York University
School of Continuing Education
New York, New York
1/93-11/94
Major: International Relations
Course Work: Six courses in International Relations, including studies in global
economy, military affairs and international political theory.
Master of Arts
University of Miami
8/94-5/97
Major: Modern Europe
Minor: American History
G.P.A. 3.9
Continuing Studies in Education
Florida International University
7/97-7/98
Course Work:
Completed undergraduate course work required for Florida State Certification in Social Studies.
Curriculum consisted of five education courses, two economic courses and one geography course.
Doctor of Philosophy (Phd)
Pennsylvania State University
Early Modern European History
Completed course work requirements during the
period of 9/00 – 5/03. Spent two academic
semesters studying in Harvard University’s
History of Science Department during 2002.
Conducted archival research abroad
from 1/03 – 6/05. Dissertation title:
The Secrets of Health; Views on Healing from the
Everyday Level to the Printing Presses in Early
Modern Venice, 1500-1650.
9/00 – 8/09