history, medicine, and the traditions of renaissance learning

History, Medicine, and the

Traditions of Renaissance Learning

History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning

nancy g . siraisi

the university of michigan press ann arbor

Copyright by the University of Michigan 2007All rights reservedPublished in the United States of America byThe University of Michigan PressManufactured in the United States of Americac Printed on acid-free paper

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Siraisi, Nancy G.History, medicine, and the traditions of Renaissance learning /

Nancy G. Siraisi.p. cm. (Cultures of knowledge in the early modern world)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13: 978-0-472-11602-7 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0-472-11602-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. MedicineHistory16th century. 2. Renaissance. I. Title.

R146.S57 2008610.9dc22 2007010656

ISBN13 978-0-472-02548-0 (electronic)

For

nobuyuki siraisi

PREFACE AND

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

his book is a study of connections, parallels, and mutual interactionbetween two inuential disciplines, medicine and history, in fteenth- to

seventeenth-century Europe. The elevation of history in status and signi-cance, the expansion of the scope and methods of history, and the related(but distinct) growth of antiquarianism are among the most strikingandrecently among the best studiedfeatures of the humanist culture of thatperiod. Over the same centuries, medical knowledge, too, was transformed inways that linked learned tradition with empirical investigations and with anemphasis (not new, but greatly increased) on description, narrative, materialevidence, and particulars; and humanismin many senses of that slipperytermstrongly inuenced not only the content and presentation of medicalknowledge but the entire intellectual formation of academically educatedmedical practitioners.

Since much evidence suggests that medieval and Renaissance medicallearning was in general highly responsive to contemporary intellectual cur-rents, I thought it would be worth inquiring into the extent both to whichchanging notions of history affected the literature of medicine and to whichmedical men contributed to historical writing. In short, I sought answers tothese questions: What aspects of Renaissance medicine resonated with thecontemporary understanding of history or historical method? What kind ofhistory did medical doctors write? What kinds of doctors wrote history? Suchanswers as I found are in the following pages. As I pursued this topic, the

T

eclectic enthusiasm with which Renaissance physicians embarked on histori-cal writing led me into many new areas and taught me a lot. I shall miss theircompany.

I owe thanks to many friends and colleagues for their help at differentstages of this work. I am particularly grateful to the scholarly editors of theUniversity of Michigan Press series Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Mod-ern WorldAnn Blair, Anthony Grafton, and Jacob Solland to two anony-mous referees for the University of Michigan Press for very useful commentson the entire manuscript. I also wish to thank Frdric Tinguely for readingand commenting on chapter 8 and Ian Maclean and Gianna Pomata for help-ful discussions and advice. Remaining mistakes are, of course, my own. It hasbeen a pleasure to work with Chris Hebert as editor. A grant from the MellonFoundation nanced travels to libraries in Europe and research expenses athome. At different times, Manu Radhakrishnan and Christopher Petitt pro-vided research assistance. Thanks also to Alice Falk for help with manuscriptpreparation. I am grateful to the staffs of all the libraries where I have worked,but especially to Miriam Mandelbaum and Arlene Shaner of the Rare BookRoom of the New York Academy of Medicine.

Invitations to deliver the Josephine Waters Bennett Lecture at the annualmeeting of the Renaissance Society of America in 1999 and the Garrison Lec-ture at the annual meeting of the American Association for the History ofMedicine in 2003 provided opportunities to begin to develop the themes ofthis book. I am grateful to the Renaissance Society of America for permissionto reuse some of the material from my article based on the rst of those lec-tures, Anatomizing the Past: Physicians and History in Renaissance Cul-ture, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 130. Though not incorporated intothis book, my article based on the second of those lecturesMedicine andthe Renaissance World of Learning, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 78(2004): 136also sets out a preliminary sketch of some of the questions andissues I have tried to explore more fully here. Somewhat different versions ofsections of chapters 2 and 4 appeared in, respectively, History, Antiquarian-ism, and Medicine: The Case of Girolamo Mercuriale, Journal of the Historyof Ideas 64 (2003): 23151, and Oratory and Rhetoric in Renaissance Medi-cine, Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2004): 191211both copyright Jour-nal of the History of Ideas, Inc., and both reprinted by permission of the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Press. Another short section of chapter 2 will appearin Thomas Rtten, ed., Geschichte der Medizingeschichtsschreibung (Rem-scheid: Gardez! [in press]). An earlier version of a section of chapter 5appeared as part of my article Cardano and the History of Medicine, in

viii Preface and Acknowledgments

Girolamo Cardano: Le opere, le fonti, la vita, ed. Marialuisa Baldi and GuidoCanziani (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1999); I am grateful to FrancoAngeli for per-mission to reuse this material. An earlier version of chapter 6 appeared asHistoriae, Natural History, Roman Antiquity, and Some Roman Physi-cians, in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed.Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005),32554; I thank MIT Press for permission to reprint this material. An earlierversion of a section of chapter 8 appeared in In Search of the Origins of Med-icine: Egyptian Medicine and Paduan Physicians, in Inventing Genealogies,ed. Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 2001), 23561; I am grateful to Duke University Press for permission toreprint.

Finally, as always, my greatest thanks are owed to my husband, to whomthis book is dedicated.

Preface and Acknowledgments ix

CONTENTS

List of Figures xiii

Abbreviations xv

Note to the Reader xvii

Introduction 1

par t 1 . histor y in medical literature

Preface to Part 1. A Diagnosis from History 23

1. Bodies Past 25

2. History and Histories in Medical Texts 63

3. Life Writing and Disciplinary History 106

par t 2 . physicians, civil histor y,and antiquarianism

Preface to Part 2. Rival Physician Historians of the Italian Wars 137

4. Milan: Problems of Exemplarity in Medicine and History 141

5. Rome: Medicine, Histories, Antiquities, and Public Health 168

6. Vienna: Physician Historians and Antiquaries inCourt and University 194

7. Beyond Europe 225

Conclusion: Medicine, History, and the Changing Face of Scientic Knowledge 261

Notes 269

Bibliography 357

Index 421

FIGURES

Fig. 1. Portrait of Galen from an edition of his Therapeutica and Therapeutica ad Glauconem (Venice, 1500) 5

Fig. 2. A supposed giants tooth illustrated in Thomas Bartholins Historiarum anatomicarum rariorum Centuria I et II 41

Fig. 3. Pirro Ligorios depiction of ancient Greek athletes lifting weights,from Girolamo Mercuriales De arte gymnastica libri sex 48

Fig. 4. Title page of Hippocrates Opera published in Basel in 1526, placing Hippocrates in the company of Greek and Roman philosophers, poets, rhetoricians, and historians 83

Fig. 5. Duke Antoine of Lorraine leading his troops to battle, as illustrated in Symphorien Champiers Le recueil ou croniques des hystoires des royaulmes daustrasie 140

Fig. 6. The physician, poet, and historian Johannes Cuspinianus as depicted in Johannes Sambucuss Veterum aliquot ac recentium medicorum philo-sophorumque icones 203

Fig. 7. Members of the early Germanic tribes as illustrated in Wolfgang Laziuss De gentium aliquot migrationibus, sedibus xis, reliquiis, linguarumque initiis et immutationibus ac dialectis, libri XII 216

Fig. 8. Title page of the revised edition of Giovanni Tommaso Minadois Historia della guerra fra Turchi, et Persianipublished in Venice in 1588 253

ABBREVIATIONS

ADB Knigliche Akademie der Wissenschaften. Historische Commission.Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. 56 vols. 18751912. Reprint, Berlin:Duncker & Humblot, 196771.

DBI Dizionario biograco degli italiani. 67 vols. to date. Rome: Istitutodella Enciclopedia, 1960.

DSB Dictionary of Scientic Biography. 16 vols. New York: Scribner,197080.

NDB Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Munich. HistorischeKommission. Neue Deutsche Biographie. 22 vols. to date. Berlin:Duncker & Humblot, 1953.

NB Vienna, sterreichische Nationalbibliothek.

NOTE TO THE READER

ources cited in boldface type in the notes to this book appear in thePrinted Primary Sources section of the bibliography.

In Latin titles and quoted passages, capitalization has been modernized.Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

S

INTRODUCTION

mong historical works produced in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries,the Nuremberg Chronicle, the Chronicon Carionis, and Paolo Giovios

Histories of His Own Times stand out for several reasons. The NurembergChronicle has achieved lasting fame as a masterpiece of Renaissance book pro-duction. Successive recensions of the Chronicon Carionis perpetuatedschemes of universal history and provided the view of humanitys past forgenerations of Lutheran students. Notwithstanding the disparagement ofsome critics, Giovios panorama of contemporary history reached an interna-tional readership in Catholic Europe, with eleven editions in the originalLatin, plus twelve in Italian, four in French, and one each in German andSpanish translation. But seen from a different point of view, all three of theseworks exemplify the theme of this book: the participation of authors trainedin medicine in the Renaissance enthusiasm for and writing of history.

In 1493, the simultaneous publication in both Latin and German of thelavishly illustrated Nuremberg Chronicle was a tting expression of local civicpride in one of the wealthiest cities of northern Europea complicated andexpensive project, the fruit of a collaboration among merchant patrons withhumanist tastes, artists, the printer, and the author. The authoror, rather,compilerin question was Hartman Schedel, one of many Germans whotraveled south to obtain a medical degree from Padua. Eventually, hereturned to Nuremberg, where he spent the rest of his career as a medicalpractitioner, book collector, and leading member of the small local humanistcircle. Dr. Schedels role in the making of the Chronicle is testimony not only

A

to his own historical interests but also to the esteem in which his historicallearning as well as his medical knowledge were held among Nurembergs civicand intellectual elite. Johann Carion is best remembered as an astrologer, butduring his short life, he practiced medicine as well as reading the skies andsummarizing world history for German princely courts. Subsequently, revi-sions and expansion by Melanchthon almost entirely subsumed Carionscontribution to the work that bears his name; and after Melanchthons death,the Chronicon Carionis reached its nal form in the continuation by CasparPeucer, professor of medicine at Wittenberg, medical practitioner, and med-ical and theological author. Giovio received his doctorate in medicine fromPavia in 1511; before turning to history and to ecclesiastical careerism at thepapal court, he practiced and wrote on medicine in Rome.1

That three well-known and much-studied contributions to Renaissancehistorical literature should all embody the work of medically trained authorsis not an anomaly or just an unusual coincidence. Rather, these are examplesdrawn from a much larger body of Renaissance and early modern historicalwriting by medical men. The present book is a study of the extensive involve-ment of physicians in the reading, production, uses, and shaping of historicalknowledge in the period ca. 14501650. It should be said at the outset, how-ever, that it is certainly not (nor is it intended to be) a comprehensive accountof what is in fact a large and scattered body of material, widely varying in thecharacter and signicance of its individual items. Instead, I have drawn onselected examples, both from the literature of medicine and from historicalwriting by physician authors on subjects unrelated to medicine, in an attemptto uncover some of their intellectual motivations and disciplinary method-ologies, as well as the professional, social, and intellectual contexts that mayhave fostered historical or antiquarian interests among physicians. Hence,this book aims both to investigate a salient but hitherto little explored aspectof Renaissance medical humanism and to consider the place of physicians inthe intellectual world of late fteenth- to early seventeenth-century historyand antiquarianism.

Remarking on the prominent presence of medical men among antiquar-ies, Peter Burke has noted the need for a study of physicians in early modernculture.2 I hope this book goes some way in that direction, notwithstandingits limitations of scope and chronology. History was surely not the only disci-pline outside medicine to which Renaissance and early modern physiciansaddressed themselves. Yet there is reason to suppose that both history andantiquarianism were in some ways particularly congenial to medicine andthat the relation was multifaceted and of broad signicance. Between the

2 History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning

fteenth century and the mid-seventeenth, the intersections of history andmedicine took many forms, of which interest in the past of medicine itself asa discipline or profession was only one. The enthusiasm of Renaissancehumanists for the historical, biographical, and doxographical literature ofantiquity indeed reshaped the presentation of medicines past (as that of many other branches of learning). But in the same period, other relationsof history and medicine were of equal or greater importance.

A new esteem for history as a branch of learning, new humanist historiog-raphy, and growing scholarly interest in material remains of the past wereprominent features of fteenth- and sixteenth-century humanist culture. Inthis intellectual environment, such historical elements within medicine asnarrative, empiricism, and attention to particulars and to material evidencealso took on new prominence. These features were of course present in themedicine of the Middle Ages, alongside its scholastic and philosophicalaspects. But from about the turn of the fteenth and sixteenth centuries, theybegan to acquire greatly enhanced weight and signicance, as medical menincorporated ever-increasing amounts and new genres of narrative, descrip-tion, and record into their medical writingsdevelopments that are amongthe most noteworthy features of Renaissance medical literature. Thus, boththe context of a polymathic and historically oriented humanist culture andfeatures internal to medicine united to make it easy for some medical men toturn without any sense of incongruity to the writing of civil history, profes-sional or other lives, or histories of sciences and to the study of antiquitiesand, in short, of any aspect of the human past. But in the case of medical as ofother authors, the specic direction taken by an individuals historical inter-ests frequently owed much to social and institutional circumstances, amongthem educational structures, patronage (especially connections with theworld of princely courts), regional loyalties, and local scholarly communities.

Although some of the themes of the following chapters could protably betraced into the eighteenth century, the later seventeenth century marks anappropriate point at which to end. By then, for some physicians (if not yet formedical culture as a whole), the distinction between professional and special-ized scientic knowledge and humanistic learning was beginning slowly tobecome sharper and clearer. In the broader culture, historical methodologybegan to undergo signicant change. Moreover, the relation between medi-cine and history started to shift in signicant ways as medicines ancientauthorities gradually ceased to be a source of current practical informationand as new varieties of medical history began to emerge in the late seven-teenth century and still more in the eighteenth.

Introduction 3

Thus, this book is primarily an account of an episode in the history ofEuropean learning that also belongs to the story of the rise of empiricism inboth the life and human sciences. Among medically trained men who activelyengaged with history (in any of the senses just mentioned) are some very well-known guresfor example, in addition to those named at the beginning ofthis chapter, Girolamo Cardano, Gabriel Naud, and Hermann Conringand many others more obscure. No precise count of the number of physicianswho wrote on historical or antiquarian topics is available, and they presum-ably always remained a minority even among the elite of medical practition-ers who left written works. But the following chapters leave no doubt thatthey constituted a substantial group, whose members formed part of thelearned elite that shared in and shaped Renaissance intellectual life. Betweenthe late fteenth century and the mid-seventeenth, the role of humanisticlearning in medical education, the enlarged place of history and antiquarian-ism in the broader intellectual environment, characteristics internal to medi-cine as then understood, and some social settings all seem to have combinedto encourage physicians to develop historical and antiquarian interests of thekind described in this book. Hence, alongside other factors in the Renaissanceand early modern development of both medicine and history, the relation ofmedicine with history also calls for attention. In short, the interaction of his-tory, medicine, and the traditions of Renaissance learning merits considera-tion as a phase of European intellectual history.

humanism and renaissance medicine

From the latter part of the fteenth century onward, humanistic inuencesstrongly affected medical learning. The term medical humanism usually refersto a core enterprise of intensive philological study, editing, and translation ofancient Greek medical textsthe occupation of a relatively small number ofHellenist scholarsand to the reception and scientic inuence of the fruitsof these labors among a wider medical audience. In areas central to medicine,leading gures of the period engaged in the ongoing task of explicating arecently enlarged corpus of ancient medical, anatomical, and natural philo-sophical writing. The resulting fuller knowledge of Greek medicine inspiredboth imitation of the texts and, in some celebrated instances, their criticalconfrontation with nature. Allied with a new empiricism, such confronta-tions helped to produce the justly famous scientic contributions associatedwith medicine in the century and a half spanning the lifetimes of Vesalius andHarvey: the development of anatomy; the expansion of botanical and natural


historical knowledge; extensive discussions of the signs, transmission, andnature of disease; and the beginning of cumulative advances in physiology.These are achievements of central importance for the history of science andmedicine and, indeed, for modernization in Europe. They have long rightlybeen and continue to be the subject of intense study.

Given the role of ancient texts inand the basic assumptions ofRenais-sance and early modern medical culture, all the activities that I have justnamed involved mastery of substantial classical learning as well as technicalknowledge. But the broadly common basis of learning in all humanistic dis-

Introduction 5

Fig. 1. Portrait of Galen from his Therapeutica lib. XIV, Therapeutica ad Glauconem lib.II (Venice: [Z. Callierges for N. Blastus], 1500). Niccol Leoniceno provided the manu-scripts for this edition, the rst to print authentic works of Galen in Greek and a land-mark of medical humanism (see Durling 1961, 236, note 32). The artist has representedGalen seated in a large chair, with upraised hand, and book, features thatunlike thedistinctive hatare often found in late medieval and Renaissance depictions of aca-demics. Here they seem to portray the Greek physician as a medical professor lecturingto his students. Wellcome Library, London.

ciplines, including medicine, also enabled many medically trained individu-als to be full participants in a learned world extending well beyond medicine.Renaissance medical humanism both fostered and provided ample scope forthe development among learned physicians of interests characteristic ofhumanistic culture in general: fascination with all kinds of manipulations ofnature, ranging from natural magic to engineering; changing philosophicalpreferences, particularly the diversication of Aristotelianism and the revivalof Platonism; and enhancement of the status of history, narrative, anddescription of particulars. Moreover, medicine, like other learned disciplines,underwent something of a literary transformation; many (though by nomeans all) authors of works in such standard genres as the commentary aban-doned scholastic quaestiones in favor of a more humanistic style, and other,newer genres of medical writing emerged.

Furthermore, although the map of the disciplines was changing in thesixteenth century and new specialties were taking shape, academic learningstill led its possessors into an intellectual world that was in many respectsunspecialized. The formation in arts that in some form or another precededuniversity medical education was likely to involve substantial exposure torhetoric, logic, and natural philosophy; thus, medical graduates of Italianuniversities often taught logic or philosophy during the rst few years oftheir careers. Astrology and some aspects of philosophy were not just part ofpreliminary general education but, on occasion, had a well-dened placewithin medicine itself. The role of astrology in early modern medical prac-tice may not have been quite as pervasive as is sometimes claimed. Never-theless, some sixteenth-century medical practitioners erected astrologicalgures for the onset of patients illnesses; probably almost all paid attentionto critical days of illness supposed to depend on the phases of the moon.3

Thus, although the level of knowledge and use of astrology doubtless variedwidely, most medical practitioners were familiar with another, still-respected discipline that, like medicine itself, regularly made use of retroac-tive analysis and historical or biographical narrative as well as prediction.Philosophical concepts continued to play a part in medical arguments, asone has only to read a few humanistic (and not only scholastic) medicalcommentaries to discover.

When a student moved on from arts to medical studies, he certainlyreceived technical training in knowledge peculiar to medicine and familiaritywith a specialized medical literature; but he was simultaneously inducted intoa humanistic (or in some settings, still largely scholastic) professional andintellectual community. Unambiguously, the possession of a university degree


in medicine constituted a professional qualicationit was, for example, aprerequisite for entry into colleges of physicians or for possession or claim ofvarious forms of authority over other practitioners. University training inmedicine provided a common core of bookish knowledge based on a corpusof medical textsancient, medieval, and modernand some practical train-ing. Perhaps even more important, as Willem Frijhoff has noted, it providedprofessional socialization.4 Most graduate physicians made their living bymedical practice or by a combination of practice and teaching. But for manygraduate physicians, technical medical knowledge was undoubtedly only oneaspect of their learning. Moreover, the boundaries of learning deemed appro-priate and useful to a physician seem to have been quite broad and indetermi-nate. Traditional links between medicine and natural philosophy, the philo-logical approach encouraged by medical humanism, emerging connectionsbetween medicine and natural history, and the interaction of physicians withpolitical authorities all suggested directions in which intellectually ambitiousmen might pursue branches of learning that were not strictly medical yet wereperceived by themselves and their contemporaries as not just compatible withbut appropriate to a medical career.

Moreover, as some of the lives and works discussed in the following chap-ters make clear, writing on historical, biographical, or antiquarian topics aswell as or instead of medicine evidently contributed, in at least someinstances, to the success of a medically trained authors career. It is not possi-ble to identify any single typical career pattern for successful physician histo-rians: some authors, such as Hartmann Schedel, combined their historicalinterests with lifelong commitment to medicine; others, such as PaoloGiovio, abandoned medicine for history at the rst opportunity. Further-more, such omnipresent early modern realities as patronage and confessionalallegiance, as well as other imponderable factors, surely often also played apart in determining the trajectory of a professional career. But these otherinterests and writings by physicians can also be characterized as professionalin at least two senses. In pragmatic terms, learning not directly related tomedicine might advance a physicians career because it was useful toor atthe least served to impressinuential patrons/patients, particularly in theworld of the court. In intellectual terms, the natural philosophical andhumanistic as well as medical knowledge and skills involved in acquiringsignicant medical learning had manifold applications. Moreover, althoughno one would claim that all the medical or historical or antiquarian worksdiscussed in the following chapters were of major signicance, most of theirauthors seem to have enjoyed a relativelyand in some cases a highlypriv-

Introduction 7

ileged position, even among the minority of the medical profession consti-tuted by graduate physicians. In this context, it is worth noting that most ofthe graduate physicians in early seventeenth-century Tuscany seem to havespent their entire careers in practice in small towns, that most (like many con-temporary holders of the numerous minor and low-paid chairs in medicine,logic, and philosophy at the University of Bologna) apparently left no writtenworks, and that the vast corpus of sixteenth-century writing by graduates inmedicine includes innumerable minor medical treatises by authors of a singlepiece or very few works.5 But historical and antiquarian interests were cer-tainly no guarantee of professional success either.

It may be instructive to provide an example of a physician whose histori-cal interests brought him very little. Giovanni Battista Pellegrini was a mem-ber of a Bolognese noble family who spent his entire career at the Universityof Bologna. He graduated in philosophy and medicine in 1542 at the age oftwenty-four. Thereafter, he briey taught logic and philosophy before mov-ing to a professorship in medical theory, which he held for twenty years, untilhis death in 1566. He left three treatises, two of which were brief tracts on dis-ease and medical signs. The third was an almost three-hundred-folio apolo-gia against the calumniators of philosophy and medicine. This work, whichis certainly evidence of its authors philosophical and historical learning(being replete with citations of Plato and lengthy discussions of matters rang-ing from ancient Greek and Roman political institutions to the transmigra-tion of souls), is devoted to arguing the superiority of medicine and philoso-phy over lawin the context of a dispute over precedence in academicprocessions at the University of Bologna. Although such a major gure asGirolamo Cardano thought well enough of Pellegrinis learning to regard himas a friend and to exchange medical commentaries with him, his career wasclearly narrow and not very rewarding, either intellectually or nancially. Hisfriend Cardano described Pellegrini as timid, of melancholy habit, bur-dened by poor health, and barely able to support his wife and ve children.6

history and antiquarianism in renaissance culture

No short summary can do justice to the changes in the status of history overthe course of the fteenth to early seventeenth centuries or to the ever-expanding modern scholarship on the subject; the following, highly com-pressed sketch aims simply to outline a few of the most relevant develop-ments. Throughout the Middle Ages, vigorous traditions of historical writing


ourished in chronicles, hagiography, and other genres. But in Aristotelianscholastic epistemology, history occupied a position much inferior to philos-ophy, in that reasoning from fundamental principles to universally validconclusions was held to be the only procedure that yielded understanding ofcauses and true knowledge (scientia). By contrast, the studia humanitatis gavehistory, together with rhetoric and moral philosophy, a central position.Humanists paid new attention to ancient characterizations of history byAristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian and set out to imitate ancient models of his-torical writing, some available for the rst time in western Europe. As aresult, both the style and the substance of historical writing changed.Leonardo Bruni and other fteenth-century chancellors or secretaries wrotecopiously on history, developing new forms of secular political historyadirection carried further by Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Growing theoreti-cal interest in history and its methods, already evident in the late fteenthcentury among some Italian humanists, led in the sixteenth to the produc-tion of a whole series of treatises on the ars historica in Italy, Germany, andFrance; the most famous of these is Jean Bodins Methodus ad facilem histori-arum cognitionem, rst published in 1566. At the same time, although historyremained closely connected to rhetoric and moral philosophy and was usu-ally considered exemplary in function, the term historia began again to beunderstoodand to acquire a range of applicationsin its original Greeksense of narrative of the results of an inquiry, that is, a report on research.But over the course of the next two centuries, as Anthony Grafton haspointed out, the expansion of historical and geographical knowledge and themultiplication of historical sources and methodologies ultimately under-mined both the unique standing of the ancient historians and the claims ofhistory to be moral and exemplary.7

Throughout the period under discussion and beyond, writers of historycame from all categories of literate society. Their numbers included human-ist secretaries or teachers, university professors in a variety of elds, membersof the clergy, lawyers, and physicians, as well as the occasional courtier (forexample Sir Walter Raleigh) and some nobles or patricians. Motivations forwriting histories were doubtless as numerous as historiansincluding thedesire to display humanist erudition, civic or family pride, personal experi-ence of dramatic political or military events, and the behest of patrons.8

Moreover, the encyclopedic and polymathic character of late Renaissancelearning ensured that much historical, biographical, and antiquarian infor-mation was transmitted via general reference works, in forms that did notencourage the development of historical specialization.9 Nonetheless, in-

Introduction 9

creasing awareness and deployment of history in sectarian, legal, and politicalcontexts fostered more specialized forms of historical inquiry and writing. Inparticular, as several well-known studies have shown, authors trained injurisprudence played a major role, especially in France. They were responsi-ble not only for the humanist historicization of Roman law but also, moregenerally, for important contributions to historiographic theory and to thedevelopment of archival research.10

Other motivations for the proliferation of historical writing and the devel-opment of historical genres were to be found in concepts of national or eth-nic origin; the genealogical ambitions, or fantasies, of dynastic rulers; and thedesire for new, sectarian versions of ecclesiastical (and providential) historyin the age of the Reformationof which the chief monuments were the col-laborative enterprise of the Magdeburg Centuries and the work of Baronio.These various motivations for interest in history were not necessarily mutu-ally exclusive. Thus, in the case of the jurist and writer on the ars historicaFranois Baudouin, his historical ideas and methodology emerged in the con-text both of the French legal milieu and of a lifelong interest in ecclesiasticalhistory.11 In the sixteenth century, too, history began to acquire a presence insome universities in the German lands; Melanchthon gave lectures on historyat Wittenberg, and the Lutheran University of Marburg had a professorshipof history from the time of its foundation in 1527.12 Furthermore, as DanielWoolf has illustrated with much detail for England, the general readership forand awareness of history of all kinds seems to have broadened over the courseof the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries.13

As striking as the changes in the writing of narrative political, military,and ecclesiastical history in the fteenth and sixteenth centuries was thedevelopment of antiquarianismthe study of the customs, institutions, andmaterial culture of the ancient past. Although the basis for many such studiesremained primarily textual, antiquarianism, allied with enthusiasm for col-lecting ancient artifacts, added a new emphasis on material and visual evi-dence (especially that of inscriptions and coins). In one of the most impor-tant theoretical treatises on history written during the sixteenth century,Francesco Patrizi noted approvingly:

[Some authors] write not so much about the acts of nations as aboutways of life, customs, and laws. . . . And there is another sort, especiallyin our day, those who write in [yet] another way, addressing such top-ics as the clothing of the Romans and the Greeks, their weaponry, theirways of making camp, and their ships, their buildings, and all sorts of


things necessary for their way of life. . . . And others, again, write in acertain novel way about the magistrates of the Romans and the Greeks,and others about the form of the republics of Rome, or Athens, orSparta, or Carthage, or Venice. As you know, this is a most useful kindof writing.14

In the sixteenth century, as Arnaldo Momigliano showed in a seminal article,antiquarian studies and the writing of narrative histories were usually separateundertakings. In 1560, Patrizi was still unusual in recognizing the relevance ofsuch subjects for his general work on history. Yet not all authors treated thetwo genres as completely distinct. Some wrote both historical and antiquarianworks, others embedded antiquarian description in historical narratives, andyet others used archaeological ndings to revise narrative history.15

Some physicians, too, turned their attention to aspects of antiquity and, insome instances, types of sources more usually thought of as the province ofantiquarians and travel writers: social customs, institutions, ethnography,and material remains. To say that medicine shared in the early modern cul-ture of antiquarianism is not to claim that the major original contributions toknowledge of the Roman past made in that period owed anything much tomembers of the medical profession. Those achievements were the work ofantiquaries and historians single-mindedly dedicated to such studies (eventhough Carlo Sigonio, the editor of the inscribed Fasti Capitolini, a discoveryof great importance for understanding the chronology of Roman history,briey studied medicine at Bologna without taking a degree).16 Rather,increased attention to forms of evidence, proof, testimony, and probablearguments crossed and recrossed many areas and forms of knowledge,whether historical or natural.17

medicine and history

Two principal Renaissance theorists of history noted an afnity betweenmedicine and history. In Machiavellis eyes, the parallel lay in the fact thatmedicine and history each stored up past experience for present practicalpurposes. In the preface to the Discourses, he observed that the basis of med-icine was nothing other than the experiments made by the ancient physi-cians, on which present physicians base their judgements, and he deploredthe failure of princes and republics to use ancient experience of governmentin the same way. For Bodin, bad writers about history shared a characteristicof bad physicians: both prescribed from a randomly assembled collection of

Introduction 11

remedies without bothering to inquire into the causes of their effects. AsMarie-Dominique Couzinet has noted, these are rather different views ofmedicine. Machiavelli perceived it as a collection of empirical particulars,whereas Bodin extended the medical analogy from the empirical discovery ofremedies to the reasoning about natural causes of the rational and philosoph-ically oriented physician. Yet both views reect, accurately enough, aspects ofmedicine as understood and practiced in the sixteenth century.18

Indeed, methodological afnities between medicine and history, whichsimilarly relied on description of particulars and narrative of recorded events,appeared from the very earliest phase of both disciplines in classical Greece,as Arnaldo Momigliano and others have pointed out. Hippocratic authorsconsidered the histories of diseases and patients and of their own discipline(most famously in the treatises known as Epidemics and On Ancient Medicine,respectively); historians included accounts of disease and showed awarenessof medical teaching in their narratives, as Thucydides did when he wrote ofthe plague of Athens. These parallels cannot be pressed too far, but as JacquesJouanna has shown, they do reect one aspect of ancient medicine (another,of course, is the relation between medicine and philosophy). Moreover, inlate antiquity, writing about medicine developed a strong historical and dox-ographical component manifested in such works as the rich collection ofHippocratic pseudepigrapha and the account of the medical sects in theproem to Celsuss De medicina. The elder Pliny, like Celsus, was neither amedical man nor a historian, but substantial passages in the Natural Historydealing with the lives of physicians and the advent of Greek medicine inRome contributed to medical doxography as well as to skeptical topoi aboutmedicine.19 Above all, the writings of Galen both contained history and pro-vided a model for historical writing in several senses. One such model was thehistory of Galen himself, since parts of the Galenic corpus are strongly auto-biographical. In On Prognosis and The Method of Healing, Galen framed histeaching in accounts of his own clinical successes; he wrote treatises on hisown bibliography; and he scattered throughout his vast oeuvre anecdotesabout his travels, his public demonstrations, and his triumphs over doubtersand rivals. But Galens output is also replete with a broader medical history.Much of what is known of the earlier history of Alexandrian medicine, forexample, comes from passages in his works. Most important, Galen was apioneer of historical scholarship on Hippocrates, essentially re-creating thegure of Hippocrates in his own image.20

As is well known, western European knowledge of the heritage of ancientmedicine, further enriched by Arabic contributions, was greatly enlarged by


the translation movement of the twelfth century, which gave physiciansaccess to Latin versions of a considerable, though far from complete, collec-tion of Hippocratic, Galenic, and other texts; and in the course of the thir-teenth century, medicine emerged as one of the three higher disciplines in theuniversities. The learned, academic medicine of the later Middle Ages alwaysincluded the recognition that medicine involved both the analysis of causesand the recollection of particulars. Despite strong intellectual and profes-sional incentives to emphasize medicines relation to natural philosophy andto claim medicine as a scientia in the scholastic Aristotelian sense (i.e., leadingto universal truths via syllogistic reasoning based on accepted axioms),scholastic physicians usually admitted that this denition tted only the the-oretical part of medicine. Its practical part had to be dened as ars because somuch of it was inherently and irreducibly about particularsthe particularsof individual patients, illnesses, medicinal ingredients, and remedies and ofthe recipes and rules that went by the name of experience, or experimenta.21

Nevertheless, narratives about individual patients were relatively rare inmedieval Latin medical literature before the fourteenth century, being mostlyconned to a few anecdotes in surgical texts, although by about 1300, writtenconsilia for patients (some of which had a narrative element) and occasionalaccounts of the opening of the cadaver (for funerary preparations, for inves-tigation of supposedly miraculous phenomena, or to determine the cause ofdeath) began to appear.

Prior to the mid-fteenth century, there is little evidence to suggest thateither the particularistic or the analytic aspect of medicine encouraged anynoteworthy historical interests among medical men. As Chiara Crisciani hasshown, scholastic medical authors seem mostly to have remained contentwith briey invoking a formulaic past for their own disciplinereiteratingsuch themes as medicine as a divine gift, names of traditional founders, and achronologically unspecic story of medicines crude beginnings, perfection inremote antiquity, and subsequent loss and recovery. There are, of course,exceptions to this generalization. For example, Guy de Chauliac, the authorof the comprehensive learned Latin book on surgery that became known asthe Chirurgia magna (completed in 1363), used the De vita et moribusphilosophorum formerly attributed to Walter Burley, as well as his own med-ical reading, to construct a capsule history of surgery (from Hippocrates tohis own day) that is relatively rich in chronology and detail. Pietro dAbano(d. 1315), too, had some interest in the history of philosophy and medicine,was an early reader of Celsus, and had an exceptionally broad range of learnedreference. Yet Pietros innocence of or indifference to chronology was such

Introduction 13

that he repeated without comment Celsuss remark that the Roman physicianThemison had died recently. As for histories dealing with many anddiverse things (presumably Pietro had chronicles in mind), he dismissedthem as disordered, incapable of producing true knowledge, and, by implica-tion, interesting only to schoolboys.22

Signs of the spread of interest in history among medical men becomemarked in the second half of the fteenth centurya time when, perhaps notcoincidentally, astrologers, too, seem to have developed an interest in the his-tory of their discipline, if one may judge from the work of Simon de Phares.23

The earliest stimuli for this development as far as physicians were concernedmay have come not from anything internal to medicine or its history but fromexposure to contactswith a vigorous local chronicle tradition or humanistcircles or boththat spread the habit of reading history. Thus, professors ofmedicine at Padua in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries tookpart when the academic community twice formally endorsed works of localand recent history. The local climate of production of and interest in historyobviously failed to impress Pietro dAbano, but perhaps it encouraged themid-fourteenth-century medical professor Jacopo Dondi, author of both amassive compilation of remedies and a brief Paduan chronicle (in which hepatriotically claimed that Paduans had founded Venice, to the obfuscation ofsubsequent writers). Moreover, well before humanist philology was applied tomany medical texts, some Italian physicians began to acquire humanistic andhistorical tastes in their private reading. In the mid-fteenth century, thewealthy medical bibliophile Giovanni di Marco da Rimini, ownedalongsidehis impeccably scholastic medical and philosophical booksa respectablecollection of ancient history, including some Livy, and Latin versions of Jose-phus, Diogenes Laertius, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.24

About the same time, the career of Michele Savonarola suggests the way inwhich professional circumstances might foster the development of physicianhistorians. Moving between the worlds of university and court, Savonarolawas a professor of practical medicine at the University of Padua and later acourt physician in Ferrara, where he offered not only medical advice but alsogeneral moral, political, and practical counsel to the ruler Borso dEste. Inaddition to producing numerous Latin and vernacular medical works(among them a frequently reprinted practica, a pioneering treatise on the reg-imen of pregnant women and infants, and a vernacular diet book for hispatron), Savonarola wrote a treatise on the notable features and illustriouscitizens of Padua and corresponded about the origins of Venice with thehumanist notary and chancellor of Padua Sicco Polentone. In the next gener-


ation, another court physician at Ferrara and the most famous of all medicalhumanists, Niccol Leoniceno, translated Greek historiansDio Cassius,Procopius, and othersinto Italian, probably at the request of his ducalpatron.25

But beginning about the late fteenth century, availability of and atten-tion to a wider range of ancient medical literature, the enhanced status of par-ticulars and personal observation, an expanded role for narrative, and newforms of analysis began to transformthough certainly without overthrow-ingGalenic medicine. Among many other and better-known effects, thesedevelopments may all have helped to predispose recipients of medical train-ing to greater historical awareness. The publication of more or less the com-plete Hippocratic corpus in Latin (1525) and Greek (1526) made some of themost important examples of ancient medical narrativenamely, the case his-tories in the complete Epidemicsreadily available for the rst time. Simi-larly, Renaissance editions of works of Galen made clearer than ever beforethe extent to which he had introduced analyses of his own cases into TheMethod of Healing and other treatises. At the same time, interest in the Aris-totelian works on animals, in Pliny, and in Herodotus encouraged the spreadof the term historia as used to encompass both natural description and pastevents. Moreover, Renaissance physicians extended causal reasoning in med-icine into new areas of physical investigation. Especially when new develop-ments in anatomy began to affect the already established practice of autopsy,the explanation of appearances in the dissected cadaver could involve a chainof reasoning backward about past events in the body and life history of thedeceased. Furthermore, substantial parts of the newly recovered heritage ofancient medicine were much prized between the fteenth and the seven-teenth centuries specically because of their historical (or supposedly histor-ical) content, among them the Hippocratic pseudepigrapha and the work ofCelsus. The Renaissance recovery of important treatises, new translations,and the dissemination of Galens entire output in print made Galens medicalhistorical scholarship more fully available, more prominent, and more read-ily accessible. In the sixteenth century, this aspect of Galen was as highly val-ued as any other part of his teachingso valued that a diligent Renaissanceeditor went to the trouble of forging some of Galens missing Hippocraticcommentaries.26

In looking at the participation of medical men in historical and antiquarianculture, this book builds on much recent work in the history of science, thehistory of medicine, and intellectual history, including studies of collecting,

Introduction 15

of antiquarianism, and of histories of disciplines. Discussions of the uses ofthe term and concept historia in all its early modern senses in a workshop heldat the Max Planck Institut fr Wissenschaftsgeschichte in 2003 at the invita-tion of Lorraine Daston were especially valuable, even though the presentwork addresses only a more restricted set of meanings and uses of history.Also helpful in shaping my ideas were the discussions at an earlier colloquiumon nature and the disciplines in Renaissance Europe held at the Dibner Insti-tute for the History of Science and Technology in 1995. In the history of med-icine, the work of Ian Maclean on medical epistemology and semiology andof Gianna Pomata on medical observationes has been particularly inuential,as have the studies of Alessandro Benedetti by Giovanna Ferrari and of PaoloGiovio by T. C. Price Zimmerman, each a splendid portrait in the round of aRenaissance humanist physician and writer of history.27 In emphasizing thebroader intellectual and cultural relations of Renaissance and early modernmedicine, I do not intend (and never have intended) to diminish thesignicance of the technical and scientic content of medicine and relatedelds, much less that of the history of health, disease, and therapy. Yetalthough the scientic and, in recent years, the social and therapeutic aspectsof the medicine of this period have been much studied, I think there remainsroom for a fuller picture of the place of medicine and physicians in its intel-lectual and cultural history.

This book is divided into two sections. Part 1, History in Medical Litera-ture, explores some uses of narrative, example, material evidence, historicalconcepts, and general historical information within the literature of medi-cine. The preface to part 1, A Diagnosis from History, shows learned physi-cians calling on Roman history to conrm an empirical diagnosis made in anemergency by a surgeonthe surgeon in question being Ambroise Par.Chapter 1, Bodies Past, considers the medical response to historical ideas,arguments, and investigation regarding medicines central subject, thehuman body. It explores some examples of the participation of physicians notonly in medical controversies over the possibility that human anatomy orsusceptibility to disease might have changed since classical antiquity but alsoin broader debates over biblical and classical accounts implying that humandimensions or life span had changed since the remote past and in antiquarianinvestigation of ancient physical culture.

Chapter 2, History and Histories in Medical Texts, looks at some uses ofvarious forms of history in different genres of sixteenth-century medical lit-erature: in those explicitly structured around narrative of observed particu-lars (e.g., accounts of cases and cures, observationes, autopsy reports); in a


plague treatise in which the author pressed a version of epidemiological his-tory into the service of contemporary medical polemic; and in commentaries,with special attention to two Hippocratic works that in some respects invitehistorical treatment, Epidemics and Airs Waters Places. Galens interest in thehistory of medicine, expressed in frequent judgments of his own predeces-sors, offered a powerful model suggesting that evaluating precursors wasappropriate as an integral aspect of medical exposition, and prefaces to orpassages in Renaissance commentaries include many examples of such evalu-ation. There is no doubt, too, that the strong competitive or performativeelement in academic life encouraged a display of historical learning in pref-aces and opening lectures. At the same time, the open form of the commen-tary provided ample opportunity for historical excurses on all kinds of topics.

Chapter 3, Life Writing and Disciplinary History, turns to Renaissancetreatments of medicines past in medical paratexts. Among them are ceremo-nial medical oratory, lives of both recent and ancient physicians, and treat-ments of institutional and disciplinary history. Such texts not only drew onancient models of medical doxography but also participated fully in contem-porary developments in life writing, rhetoric, and the compilation ofaccounts of groups, professions, and institutions.

Part 2, Physicians, Civil History, and Antiquarianism, uses regional stud-ies to relate some medically trained authors contributions to general historywith specic professional, social, and intellectual environments. The preface topart 2, Rival Physician Historians of the Italian Wars, illustrates the pointwith a sketch of two physicians, one of them the well-known anatomical writerAlessandro Benedetti, who described episodes in contemporary military his-tory from opposite political standpoints. Chapter 4, Milan: Problems ofExemplarity in Medicine and History, considers contexts for the historicalthought of Girolamo Cardano, a physician who was unusually conscious ofproblems of historical methodology and interpretation and who put forwardan incisive critique of exemplary history. Cardanos own extensive use ofexamples in his medical writings, the environment of humanist historical writ-ing in his native Milan and elsewhere, and the political vicissitudes of Milanduring his lifetime all help to situate his critique.

Chapter 5, Rome: Medicine, Histories, Antiquities, and Public Health,considers the range of involvement of the medical community in the ower-ing and challenges of antiquarian studies in sixteenth-century Rome, notingespecially the contributions of some physicians to a type of practical antiquar-ianism related in one way or another to public health. In particular, investiga-tions of the ancient Roman water supply and methods of ood control had

Introduction 17

practical implications in the rapidly growing sixteenth-century city. By con-trast, chapter 6, Vienna: Physician Historians and Antiquaries in Court andUniversity, looks at the career and writings of a group of physicians in six-teenth-century Vienna who left few medical works but whose extensive writ-ings were most chiey concerned with the ancient, medieval, and recent his-tory of central Europe (especially the Habsburg lands), with the diplomaticand political claims of the Habsburg rulers and their military campaigns, andwith imperial rulers and noble genealogies. These were medically trained his-torical writers for whom the pull of their historical interests and or courtpatronagetwo instances of which included formal appointment as imperialhistoricusclearly limited their interest in medicine or drew them away fromit entirely. Yet they also tted the patternalready present in the fteenthcentury and still ourishing in the seventeenthof court physicians valued byrulers for services that were not conned to medical advice.28

Finally, chapter 7, Beyond Europe, considers some of the ways in whichEuropean medical men dealt with the history and antiquities of Egypt and theMiddle East. Physician authors, like many others, wrote on standard themesin fteenth- and sixteenth-century European treatments of the region,among them the antiquities of Egypt and more or less hostile accounts of theOttomans and their still-expanding empire. But a number of physicians,especially those in Venetian employ, also found professional opportunity totravel to Egypt and the East, in the service of Venetian merchant communi-ties or otherwise. Ancient accounts of the medical wisdom of Egypt, contem-porary usage of the medication known as mumia, and the appropriation ofthe gure of Hermes Trismegistus by Paracelsans provided strong intellectualand professional motivations for concern with ancientand in someinstances contemporaryEgyptian medicine. At the same time, employmentin the Middle East brought physicians into contact with Venetian consuls andOttoman authorities, inspired some of them to report on contemporarypolitical conditions, and led one to write a lengthy history of an ongoing warbetween the Ottomans and their eastern neighbors.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century physicians who wrote general (in the senseof nonmedical) history wrote in all the genres commonly available in theirday, ranging across periods from antiquity to their own time and from uni-versal history through biography and narratives of particular historicalepisodes or military campaigns to saints lives and to collective accounts ofparticular categories of illustrious men. Contemporaries do not often seem tohave criticized them for doing sodespite Bodins famously tart comparison


of Polybius and Giovio, which notes that the former was qualied to write thegeneral history of his own time by broad travel and personal knowledge ofmilitary life, whereas the latter was a doctor by training who spent most of histime at the papal court.29 Let us return briey to the author/compiler Hart-man Schedel, with whom this introduction began. Judging from Schedelspractice of inserting religious, political, portentous, and medical broadsheetsinto his own copy of the printed work, his conception of history embraceddivine action, past and current human actions, and medical and natural phe-nomena, bridging what are now taken to be high and low realms of culture.30

In short, medical training did not correlate with the production of any par-ticular type of history.

What qualied physicians to write history (and interested them in doingso) was the general humanistic background that they shared with contempo-raries in other elds, the historical content found within medicine, and thosedevelopments in Renaissance medicine and life sciences that increasedemphasis on the recording of particulars, the construction of narrative, andthe analysis of past events. None of these factors necessarily inuenced thechoice of genre, period, or topic. But there seem to me to be clear cases inwhich an authors medical training or views interacted with his broader his-torical understanding and interpretation, reecting habits of mind shaped bythe authors medical education, by circumstances related to his medical pro-fession, or by both. The signicant role played by learned jurists in the devel-opment of historical writing in sixteenth-century France has rightly beenassociated with legal training and interests. But learned physicians who inter-ested themselves in history and antiquities brought to these topics an intel-lectual formation that emphasized such signicant methodological featuresas the use of narrative, description, and a measure of attention to materialevidence. As one might expect, professional circumstances also played a role.Physicians who wrote on general or civil history or on antiquities were for themost part men whose careers, experience, and associations took them beyondthe sometimes narrow world of academic medical faculties into courtly orurban environments or humanistic circles.

How, then, are we to read medical participation in two centuries ofhumanistic historical culture in all its varieties? Perhaps it is necessary toreconceptualize the view of Renaissance medical learning to include elementsthat have hitherto seemed extraneous to either the social or the scientic his-tory of medicine. Perhaps, too, Renaissance intellectual history should fullyincorporate medical learning in all its varieties.

Introduction 19

par t 1

History in Medical Literature

PREFACE TO PART ONE:

A DIAGNOSIS FROM HISTORY

n May 10, 1575, the surgeon Ambroise Par was summoned to determinewhether the cause of death of two servants of a member of the Parlement

of Paris was murder or a sodaine apoplexie. Fortunately for the victims,Par, realizing that they were not dead but only profoundly unconscious, suc-ceeded in reviving them. He also quickly recognized that the case was one ofpoisoning by fumes from a charcoal brazier. Later in the day, when it was clearthat Pars emergency treatment had worked successfully, two learned physi-cians were called in. After they had commended the surgeons acumen andquick action, they discussed the cause of the accident. They said that it was nonew or strange thing, that men may be smothered with the fume and cloudyvapour of burning coales. As evidence, they cited the accounts of the death ofthe emperor Jovian in 364 CE from this cause according to Fulgosius, Volat-eranus, and Egnatiusthat is, three authors of early sixteenth-century Latinhistorical reference works: Battista Fregoso, author of a collection of memo-rable deeds and sayings; Giovanni Battista Egnazio, author of a set of lives ofRoman emperors; and the encyclopedic Raffaele Maffei.1

Here, an example from ancient civil history and a modern medical case his-tory mutually endorse one another and are both put at the service of medicalpractice. Moreover (as Par presumably intended to show when he includedthe episode in his brief treatise on how to make medical reports), the same his-torical example both offers a lesson in prudence to the ordinary person and, inconjunction with modern observation, forms part of the specialized knowl-

23

O

edge of medical practitioners. Implicit in Pars account are overlapping andinterconnected historical and medical interpretive concepts: the exemplaryfunction of history and the medical usefulness of information derived fromindividual cases. Also implicit is the idea that general historical knowledge canbe pertinent to medicine and is useful and appropriate for physicians.

In Pars anecdote, furthermore, there seems to be a perfect t betweenhistorical and medical understanding. The episode neatly illustrates method-ological features thatin the sixteenth century, as in antiquitymedicine andhistory had in common. Examples, narrative, and knowledge of particularswere essential to both. The usefulness of example was indeed one of two cen-tral interpretative concepts common to a long tradition of historical writingand to Hippocratic-Galenic medicine, the other being some version of thebelief that physical environment affected human mental and physical charac-teristics. The following three chapters examine some of the ways in whichthese two concepts manifested themselves within the fteenth- to seven-teenth-century literature of medicine.

Chapter 1 considers medical responses to the concept of an aging worldand concomitant changes in human anatomy and physiology over time.Chapter 2 explores different genres of technical medical writing for the pres-ence of a variety of types of historical narrative, ranging from contemporaryaccounts of individual cases of illness and, sometimes, autopsy to depictions ofthe education, career, and patients of Hippocrates, meditations on Hippo-cratic comments on the social and political characteristics of ancient peoples,and an attempt to trace the historical epidemiology of plague. Many of thesedifferent histories, ancient and modern, that were incorporated into the tech-nical literature of medicine were presumably offered as guides to medical prac-tice. Such a relatively pragmatic motive for appeal to ancient experience was ofcourse distinct from the moral purposes of exemplary history. But rhetoricaluse of historical example as a guide to moral conduct undoubtedly shapedsome of the historical and biographical literature surrounding medicine that isthe subject of chapter 3. The emphasis on the lives of medical men in theseaccounts, whether found in reference books of various kinds or in the para-texts accompanying editions of medical works, makes them a rich source ofRenaissance biographical writing. Many are exemplary lives, designed to teachmedical and other readers to imitate the good and avoid the bad, as the truismfavored by medieval and many humanist historians went. Nevertheless, as willbecome apparent, some late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatments ofthe past of medicinewhether institutional, doctrinal, or biographicalshowevidence of the development of new tools of historical criticism and analysis.


Chapter One

BODIES PAST

n a famous passage, Sylvius, teacher and subsequently critic of Vesalius,explained to the readers of his Introduction to Anatomy (1555)

the reason why a few things in our bodies today appear somewhat dif-ferent than [they were] in the time of Hippocrates, Galen, or othersamong the ancients. If I did not think this testimony superuous foryou, I would prove, both from the writings of the ancients and fromtombs that survive to this day, that our bodies have greatly diminishedfrom their original size. You will agree that this [size] is very muchreduced today, especially in those regions where marriage is permittedtoo freely and before the proper age. Many testimonies in both sacredand profane literature plainly convince one that the life span of theancients was also longer than that of people in our own time. Indeed,the internal parts differ in size, number, and shape in different parts ofthe world, and both the writings of the ancients and our bodies abun-dantly testify that the same things that the ancients observed are notstill found in all our bodies. So it is believable that the people of par-ticular regions, just like other animals and indeed the very plants,either receive something peculiar to the region [in which they arefound] or have undergone some change from their earlier nature.1

In short, when Galen reported that the sternum had seven segments andVesalius observed only six, Sylvius concluded, It is not an error of Galen, but

25

I

a change of nature in us.2 Vesalius, of course, turned out to have the bettercase.

Sylviuss remarks have earned him the enormous condescension of pos-terity3 (or at least of historians of science and medicine), yet his assertionthat the human body itself had a temporal as well as a natural history, in thesense of having undergone physical change since antiquity, was neither anargument hastily constructed ad hominem nor an idea peculiar to rabidlyGalenic learned physicians. Rather, it drew on ideas that, in one form oranother, were pervasive in medieval and Renaissance learned culture, weresupported by both sacred texts and an array of ancient secular authorities,and were continuously addressed in a variety of contexts other than medicalor anatomical debate. The belief that the human body had changed sinceearly times belonged to the larger pattern of thought that viewed all ofnatureindeed, the world itselfas subject to aging and deterioration. As anumber of well-known studies have shown, such ideas, which drew on bothclassical and Christian sources, were widespread in the Middle Ages and per-sisted in one form or another into the seventeenth century.4 Sylviuss appro-priation of these ideas is only one of many possible examples of Renaissanceand early modern discussions of ancient and modern human bodies. Whenphysicians addressed this theme (which emerges not only in relation toanatomy but also in claims and counterclaims about changes over time inhuman life span, susceptibility to disease, physical appearance, and body cul-ture), they took up a historical topic that was at once uniquely close to theirspecial professional interests and expertise and a prime instance of the inte-gration of their learning with broader contemporary currents of humanisthistorical and antiquarian erudition and developments in historiography.

This chapter illustrates that integration from four different vantage pointsacross the sixteenth and rst half of the seventeenth centuries. One is the rolewithin medical literature of historical concepts and information in contro-versies over supposedly new diseases and new ndings in anatomy. The sec-ond is the contributions of medically trained authors, in both medical andantiquarian works, to debates over the putative existence of giants in antiq-uity. Finally, two works seem to constitute particularly notable individualexamples of the integration of medical and antiquarian or historical culturein treating the human body of the past. These are the De arte gymnastica ofGirolamo Mercuriale (an investigation of ancient athletics and physical train-ing in which this famous and highly esteemed Italian physician presented theresults of his cooperation with classicizing antiquarians) and a treatise thatthe German polymath Hermann Conring (equally celebrated for his histori-


cal, legal, and medical erudition) devoted to comparison of the anatomy andphysiology of the ancient and the modern Germans.

But rst, some aspects of the broader context demand consideration. Sev-eral late fteenth- and early sixteenth-century developments seem likely tohave stimulated fresh interest in the implications for the human body of ven-erable ideas about the aging world. One was the recognition of discrepanciesbetween ancient anatomical description and contemporary anatomicalobservation to which Sylvius was responding. Another was an epidemiologi-cal event or, rather, set of eventsnamely, the outbreak of morbus gallicusand other unfamiliar epidemics that sparked controversy over the possibilitythat human beings were now subject to new diseases unknown to theancients. In addition, other, more general intellectual trends that were by nomeans specic to anatomy or medicine also served to encourage new interestin the idea of differences between the early and the modern body.

In the rst place, humanist learning was yielding fuller and more nuancedknowledge of the entire range of classical accounts of human origins andprimitive development and of the extent of their diversity. These accountstended to agree that the bodies as well as the social behavior of early peoplediffered from those of their later successors, but were by no means in agree-ment as to the nature and causes of the physical differences. In some versions,the ease and fertility of a Golden Age produced bodies endowed with subse-quently unachievable health and longevity; in others, early people werestronger than their descendants because of the rigors of primitive life. Someauthors told of a sudden transformation of the human body from its originalto its present form through an external cause (divine or not); according toothers, change was gradual and resulted from changing human behavior.Some accounts referred to a past of mythological remoteness; others wereclearly, at least in intention, anchored in historical time.5

A new interest in the nature of the giants of antiquity, whose existence wasasserted both in the Bible and by some classical authors, also served to focusattention on ancient human bodies. Indeed, as Walter Stephens and AntoineSchnapper have pointed out, biblical endorsement of ancient giants wasenough to secure their survival, at least in clerical circles, through most of theeighteenth century, well after the demise of most other fabulous beings.6

Renaissance debates about giants owed much to the writings of Annius ofViterbo (1432?1502) and to his gift for forging authoritative ancientsources. His claim that the biblical patriarch Noah and his immediate prog-eny were both founders of peoples and cities in western Europe and literallygiants was widely inuential.7 One important implication of Anniuss

Bodies Past 27

account was that postdiluvian giants of antiquity were neither a soulless mon-strous race nor individual anomalies but fully human.8

In addition, reports from transatlantic voyages brought awareness of peo-ples whose way of life might seem comparable to the early stages of humanexistence as portrayed by ancient authors.9 Moreover, some of these reportsalso reinforced the notion, already familiar from such authoritative ancienttexts as the Hippocratic Airs Waters Places and Ptolemys Tetrabiblos, thatboth climate and custom affected the physical characteristics of differenthuman populations.10 Among the more extreme examples were widely dis-seminated accounts of Amazons in Brazil and of naked giants in Patagonia.11

Furthermore, in different ways, two very different faces of Renaissanceand early modern antiquarianism both encouraged attention to the physicalcharacteristics of early people. Authors interestedusually from a highlylocalized and protonationalistic standpointin the origins, characteristics,and conditions of life of the peoples of northern Europe in the remote pastmight draw information, comparisons, ideas, and speculations from all thetypes of sources just mentioned.12 At the same time, classicizing antiquarian-ism, which particularly ourished in Italy, was characterized by an insatiableinterest in every detail of the customs and practices of the Greek and Romanpast, including textual and material evidence relating to physical culture andbody training.13

But notwithstanding elements of real novelty in the sixteenth- and sev-enteenth-century stores of information, controversies, and genres just sum-marized, the debates over whether, when, and how the human body hadaltered its characteristics over time rested on strongly rooted and extremelydurable traditional concepts. As already noted, some of the classicalaccounts of the primitive state and physiology of humankind were alreadywell known in the Middle Ages (notably the account of the Golden Age inOvids Metamorphoses).14 Much more important, patristic and medievalChristian theology and anthropologywhich held that along with sin, theFall of Man brought death, disease, and physical weakness into the worldlocated bodily change in a single episode in the deep past. In the twelfth andthirteenth centuries, medical and nonmedical writers alike asserted thatmedicine was a divine gift given as a remedy for the debility natural to fallenman, a formulation that enhanced the standing of medicine by insisting onlasting physical consequences of the Fall.15 Furthermore (as Joseph Zieglerhas pointed out), in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, theologicalexpositions of Adams physical nature in paradise became more and more


suffused with medical terminology used to explain the differences betweenpre- and postlapsarian physiology.16

The topic of change in the human body since early times had certainlyentered scholastic medical discourse by 1303, when Pietro dAbano gaveextended consideration in his Conciliator to the question whether humannature is weaker than it was in antiquity.17 Unusually for him, his expositionof this quaestio invoked sacred as well as secular authorities, but his statedpurpose was to solve the problem according to the opinions of astrologers,philosophers, and physicians.18 Arguments against greater debility were, hethought, the Aristotelian teachings that the world was eternal (since an eter-nal world presumably implied that things in the world would remain thesame), that every natural motion and order of nature tends toward its ownperfection, and that the human life span remained about that attested by boththe Psalmist and Hippocrates. In favor of modern debility were Solinussassertion that the men of early times were very long-lived, bigger and strongerthan those who came after, extremely beautiful, and giants; that the world,now in its seventh and last age, was growing older and decaying and that Aris-totle had also said that everything grew weaker the further it was from its ori-gin; that some statements by Aristotle about animals and by Serapion andMesue19 about the properties of herbs no longer held good; that diseasesaffected people differently than in the time of Hippocrates; and that peopleno longer achieved the great ages of the biblical patriarchs.

Pietro asserted that biblical authority proved both that human nature wasphysically weaker since the Fall and that life spans were longer in the time ofthe patriarchs. But he also identied natural, secondary causes of diminutionin the strength and longevity of the human body over time: namely, effects ofplanetary conjunctions and of the motion of the eighth sphere; corrupt andpestiferous mixtures of the elements in some places; failure to follow gooddietary regimen (a worsening problem since the time of Galen); and tooyouthful marriages, resulting in weaker offspring. The genre of the scholasticquaestio, together with Pietros own pronounced Aristotelian and astrologicalinterests and his relative neglect of accounts of human origins and earlydevelopment by ancient literary or historical writers, distinguished Pietrostreatment from the more historically oriented contributions of later authors.Nevertheless, although the nature of his own ideas about relative chronologyremains unclear, he already incorporated historicizing themes that would becharacteristic of many later treatments of the topic: the implication thatchange in the human body was not conned to the dawn of history, the com-

Bodies Past 29

parison of descriptions by classical and postclassical medical and naturalphilosophical authors with modern conditions, and the assertion that humanbehavior was responsible for physical as well as moral deterioration continu-ing until the writers own time.

Both sacred and secular sources also appear in the one of the earliestexplicitly historical treatments of human origins written by a physician, theprologue of Hartman Schedels Nuremberg Chronicle (1493).20 Schedel drewattention to the contrast between the creation story presented in the biblicalBook of Genesis and accounts by ancient authors claimed that the earliesthuman beings had emerged, along with animals and plants, from primal mud(through a natural process involving mixing and differentiation of the fourelements) and describing the life of early humans as savage and primitive. Butonce having familiarized his readers with a naturalistic explanationwhichhe attributed to Euripides and AnaxagorasSchedel, unlike Pietro dAbano,rmly repudiated it in favor of the biblical version. Thus, although discus-sions of change in the human body over time were to be greatly elaborated inthe sixteenth and early seventeenth century in the light of contemporaryissues and interests, some central themes and approaches had already beenlaid down not only by ancient authorities but also by writers working in latemedieval theological, medical, natural philosophical, and historical contextsand genres.

new diseases and new anatomy

The sixteenth-century controversies over new diseases and new ndings inanatomy involved dramatic epidemiological events, major scientic andtechnical innovations, and such central gures in Renaissance medicine asNiccolo Leoniceno and Vesalius. As a result, these controversies havedeservedly attracted considerable attention from and been well studied byhistorians of science and medicine.21 Here, I propose only to note a few exam-ples of their reliance on essentially historical arguments that on occasiondrew on sources or concepts from outside as well as within the tradition oflearned medicine.

The principal (but by no means only) debate over new diseases concernedmorbus gallicus (venereal syphilis) and began with the outbreak and spread ofthat disease in the mid-1490s. Chroniclers and diarists who described the out-break and noted the various popular names given the disease mostly referredto it as something new and unheard of. In the course of the next decade, therather numerous medical authors who hastened to publish treatises, chapters


in longer works, or consilia devoted to the subject adopted several differentpositions. Some identied it with one of the diseases producing eruptions onthe skin named by Galen, Avicenna, or other Greek or Arabic authorities.22

Others, notably the humanist physician and anatomical writer, antiquarian,and historian Alessandro Benedetti, maintained that it was a new diseaseunknown to the ancients.23 The doyen of medical humanists Niccolo Leoni-ceno carefully compared the symptoms of the modern disease with the symp-toms of diseases named by the ancient authors and found that it did notresemble any one of them. But Leoniceno nevertheless denied that new dis-eases could ever arise, on the grounds that when I consider that men are pro-vided with the same nature, born under the same heaven, brought up underthe same stars, I am obliged to think that they have always been aficted bythe same diseases, nor can I think that this illness is born suddenly only nowand has infected only our epoch and none of the preceding. And if someonethinks otherwise from me, what should this be said to be, some revenge of thegods? For if natural causes are examined, the same things occur thousands oftimes from the beginning of the world.24 His conclusion was therefore thatthe disease must have been known to the Greeks, though possibly not namedby them.

Morbus gallicus soon became a familiar feature of the disease environ-ment, but discussions of its origincomplicated after the 1520s by the emer-gence of the theory that it had arrived from the New Worldcontinued toappear, forming part of a wider series of sixteenth-century debates over thecausation and transmission of disease. Thus, Fracastoro, writing fty yearsafter Leoniceno, cited him respectfully as the rst to clear up the difcultyover the identity of morbus gallicus but then proceeded to modify Leonicenosviews by terming the disease new in the sense of having been unknown formany centuries previously.25 Fracastoro suggested that this and other diseasesrecurred cyclically through history, outbreaks being initiated by the effect onthe air of specic astrological conjunctions and then spread by contagion.

But arguments for or against the proposition that the diseases afictinghuman bodies had changed over time did not rest only on comparisons ofmodern symptoms with ancient descriptions, theories of natural causation(astral, climatic/miasmatic, or via contagion), or assertions about divineintervention. Some authors also took account of historical statements in theancient sources recording changes in disease patterns or the outbreak of sup-posedly new diseases. Pliny several times referred to the outbreak of unknowndiseases in Rome; and Celsus, a medical author highly esteemed by humanistphysicians, asserted categorically, Frequently, too, novel classes of disease

Bodies Past 31

occur about which hitherto practice has disclosed nothing, and so it is neces-sary to consider how such have commenced.26 Moreover, as Pietro dAbanohad already noted at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Galen himselfemployed the topos that the bodies of people of modern times, because oftheir overindulgence in soft living, were weaker and more subject to diseasesthan were the bodies of their ancestors. (Galen, like some of his Renaissancesuccessors, used the idea to explain away a statement in an earlier medicaltextin his case, the Hippocratic Aphorismsthat did not accord with hisown clinical experience.)27

Writing in the 1560s, Girolamo Mercuriale combined the idea of bodiesprogressively weakened by luxurious living with testimonies from ancientauthors about outbreaks of new diseases. A chapter on the beginnings ofmedicine that opens his De arte gymnastica asserts that early people livedsimply and were healthy, subsequent overindulgence brought diseases andmade necessary the invention of medicine, later perfected by Hippocrates.Nevertheless, human health continued to go from bad to worse on account ofinnite persuasions to gluttony, insatiable lust, and immense greed(innita gulae blandimenta, inexplebilis libido, immensaque voracitas), whichbrought on yet more new diseases in Roman times. Mercuriale collected awhole catena of citations from Seneca, Plutarch, Scribonius Largus, Celsus,Pliny, Galen, and Porphyry about outbreaks of new and unknown diseases,ending up with that loathsome and very destructive gallica lues that began totrouble all regions in our own time . . . , which occurred either because of theguilt of modern humanity, or by chance, or through the will of God (tempor-0ibus nostris, exsecranda illa gallica, et paene exitialis lues universas regionesvexare coepit . . . , quod vel posteriorum hominum culpa, vel fortuna, aut Deo itavolente contigit).28 The view expressed here was doubtless widely shared, butas will become apparent in later chapters, not every attempt to address epi-demiological history interpreted it as evidence of human moral or physicaldeterioration. Elsewhere, Mercuriale himself adduced historical evidence insupport of the idea that diseases themselves could weaken over time, whilethe Milanese physician and polymath Girolamo Cardano opined that plaguewould eventually improve the physique of the human race by eliminating theweak, the sickly, and those with unhealthful habits.29

The explicit and telling criticisms of aspects of Galenic anatomy put for-ward by Vesalius and others in the mid-sixteenth century engendered a vari-ety of historical arguments. The best known of these is Sylviuss defense ofGalen by way of the assertionquoted at the beginning of this chapterthathuman anatomy had changed in historic time. But the moderni, too, argued


historically. Vesalius himself looked back to the supposedly superior achieve-ments in anatomy by pre-Galenic ancients (invoking a kind of anatomicalprehistory or, perhaps better, prisca theologia). As physicians and surgeonshad done before him since at least the thirteenth century, he described hisown discipline as invented and perfected by gures of the remote past, thenfalling into obscurity and error, only to be subsequently recalled to light.30 Butin the hands of some sixteenth-century writers, such traditional formulationstook on new power: supported by Renaissance appreciation of the full rangeand diversity of ancient philosophy and science and veneration for the mostancient sources of wisdom, they became a tool for the critique of conventionalschool authors, notably Aristotle and Galen. In Vesaliuss case, as Vivian Nut-ton and others have noted, these ideas were expressed in the form of repeatedclaims that the anatomical knowledge, teaching, and techniques of theancients who taught dissection to boys in their homes and who lived beforeGalen were greatly superior to Galens own.31 By contrast, Falloppia justiedinnovation by appeal to a very different historical argument: he defended hisown criticisms and corrections of Vesalius by presenting anatomy as a histor-ically cumulative science in which past errors were progressively corrected.32

The various positions were often less clearly distinguished than my sum-mary suggests, largely because of the weight universally attached to ancienttestimony. For example, an important source for those who defended theaccuracy of early anatomical descriptions by arguing that the human bodyhad changed since they were set down was a passage in the Hippocratic AirsWaters Places about an ancient people whose practice of binding the heads oftheir infants changed the shape of the skull. According to the Hippocraticauthor, the resulting deformations then became natural and were transmit-ted to future generations. But in discussing

history, medicine, and the traditions of renaissance learning

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