Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine

130 Pages·2008·1.31 MB·English

by  Sandra Cavallo

Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern
Italian Medicine
Edited by Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore
Publisher's Note:
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online was not granted by the
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requested to refer to the printed v ersion
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Anna Morandi, Hands, mid-eighteenth century, wax, fabric and wood, 31 × 43 cm (reproduced by
courtesy of the Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Bologna, Italy)
Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine Edited by Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore
© 2008 The Author(s). ISBN: 978-1-405-18040-5
Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early
Modern Italian Medicine
Note from the Series Editor
This volume marks the sixth publication in the occasional series of essay
collections published for the Society for Renaissance Studies by Blackwell
Publishing. These collections make available in book form selected special
numbers of the Society’s journal, Renaissance Studies. The volumes are all
guest edited, and all the material appearing will also have been peer-reviewed
in the normal way, and approved by the journal’s editorial board.
John E. Law
Series Editor
Previous books in the series:
Daniel Carey, Editor, Asian Travel in the Renaissance (2004)
Ceri Davies and John E. Law, Editors, The Renaissance and the Celtic Countries
(2004)
Roberta J. M. Olson, Patricia L. Reilly and Rupert Shepherd, Editors, The
Biography of the Object in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy (2006)
Philippa Jackson and Fabrizio Nevola, Editors, Beyond the Palio – Urbanism and
Ritual in Renaissance Siena (2006)
Marta Ajmar-Wollheim, Flora Dennis and Ann Matchette, Editors, Approaching
the Italian Renaissance Interior: Sources, Methodologies, Debates (2007)
Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern
Italian Medicine
Edited by Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore
Publisher's Note:
Permission to reproduce this image
online was not granted by the
copyright holder. Readers are kindly
requested to refer to the printed v ersion
of this chapter.
Anna Morandi, Hands, mid-eighteenth century, wax, fabric and wood, 31 × 43 cm (reproduced by
courtesy of the Museo di Palazzo Poggi, Bologna, Italy)
© 2008 The Author(s). Editorial Organisation © Society for Renaissance Studies and Blackwell
Publishing Ltd
First published as Volume 21, Issue 4 of Renaissance Studies
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1 2008
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Spaces, objects and identities in early modern Italian medicine/edited by Sandra Cavallo and David
Gentilcore.
p. ; cm. – (Renaissance studies special issues)
‘Published for the Society for Renaissance Studies.’
‘First published as volume 21, issue 4 of Renaissance studies.’
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-8040-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Medicine – Italy – History. I. Cavallo, Sandra. II. Gentilcore,
David. III. Society for Renaissance Studies (Great Britain) IV. Renaissance Studies. V. Series.
[DNLM: 1. History of Medicine – Italy. 2. History, Modern 1601 – Italy. 3. Professional Role – Italy. WZ
70 G18 S732 2008]
R517.S73 2008
610.945–dc22 2007044508
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Contents
Introduction
Spaces, objects and identities in early modern Italian medicine 1
Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore
1 Miscarriages of apothecary justice: un-separate spaces of work and
family in early modern Rome 8
Elizabeth S. Cohen
2 Pharmacies as centres of communication in early modern Venice 33
Filippo de Vivo
3 Women, wax and anatomy in the ‘century of things’ 50
Lucia Dacome
4 Medical competence, anatomy and the polity in seventeenth-century
Rome 79
Silvia De Renzi
5 Malpighi and the holy body: medical experts and miraculous evidence
in seventeenth-century Italy 96
Gianna Pomata
Index 115
Introduction
Spaces, objects and identities in early modern
Italian medicine
Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore
This collection, by an international team of scholars, presents some exciting
examples of research currently being undertaken on early modern Italy with
the aim of questioning and drawing back the conventional boundaries of
medical history. It brings together historians of medicine and scholars of
different backgrounds who are re-visiting the field from new perspectives and
with the support of new questions and unexplored sources.1 By examining
crucial areas of intersection between the territory of medicine and that of
law, politics, religion, art and material culture, their work highlights the
connections between these apparently separate fields and challenges our
understanding of what we regard as medical activities, medical identities,
spaces and objects.
We hope that historians of medicine will be attracted by the novelty of
these approaches, and not just those who study Italy. Chapters in this volume
address the study of medical careers, medical identities, and the spaces
where medical activities were performed, in new ways, using a range of meth-
odologies and approaches, and over the whole span of the early modern
period. But the re-creation of these under-researched urban spaces, of their
physical and material environments, and of the range of social exchanges
that took place around them, will also appeal to historians of the city and,
more generally, to social and cultural historians, increasingly intrigued by the
possible usages of the spatial and material dimensions in historical inquiry.
Equally innovative is the way in which the chapters address issues of gender:
from the perspective of the visual and tactile representations of the female
1The essays in this collection are a selection of the papers given at a one-day conference on early modern
Italian medicine, held at the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine, UCL, in June 2004. We should
like to take this opportunity to thank Hal Cook, director of the Centre, for both the idea and the opportunity,
Sally Bragg for doing so much of the organizational work, John Henderson for chairing one of the sessions,
Peter Burke for acting as a respondent to the conference, and all those who gave papers. We are also grateful
to the anonymous reader for Renaissance Studies who assisted us, and the authors, in the process of turning
conference papers into articles.
Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine Edited by Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore
© 2008 The Author(s). ISBN: 978-1-405-18040-5
2 Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore
body, of everyday perceptions of the pregnant body; from the perspective of
female authorship and of female role in medical consumerism. The collection
will therefore be relevant also to historians of gender and of the body.
Medical historians have often paid disproportionate attention to the
canonical settings where medicine was practised – hospitals, universities and
anatomical theatres – to the detriment of other spaces. While not ignoring
these, the articles in this collection seek to redress the balance, shedding
light on the multiplicity of contexts in which medical expertise was exercised:
the court and the aristocratic households, the convents, the academies, the
tribunals, the domestic environment. Even an apparently obvious site for the
practice of medicine, the apothecary’s shop, has not received enough atten-
tion from historians. We may now know a fair amount about Renaissance and
early modern pharmacy; but we know far less about pharmacists, and less still
about what went on in their shops, in addition to the preparation of drugs.
De Vivo explores the roles these shop spaces could play in a city like Venice,
by no means limited to the medicinal or the economic. He demonstrates the
political and social functions of pharmacies; places where people, prevalently
males, socialized, gambled, gathered political information and exchanged
views about politics and religion. The apothecary’s shop was also a place of
social mingling and inter-class encounter, which allowed young professionals
(not just physicians and surgeons but lawyers, for example) to meet potential
clients. Workplaces, like domestic spaces, were multifunctional and such
diversity was not just the outcome of necessity but, as De Vivo suggests,
strategic to increasing their commercial allure.2 This is why some care was
taken in furnishing such places in pleasant and appealing ways. The confec-
tioner discussed in Cohen’s contribution likewise went to great lengths to
decorate his shop, complete with wall hangings. The study of the workplace
interior is an important new avenue of research, but its material culture
should not just be regarded as functional to the preparation and storage of
the products on sale.3 The furnishings and fittings of Venetian pharmacies
reveal the strategies of self-presentation and self-promotion pursued by the
apothecary and the aim to create a hospitable and interesting environment
where exotic objects, for example, were displayed to stimulate the curiosity
of clients and advertise the intellectual credentials of the apothecary.
The focus on canonical medicine has, in turn, limited our appreciation of
the variety of actors engaged, in professional and non-professional forms, in
medical activities. This extended scope of observation highlights, in parti-
cular, the medical role played by a range of female figures. Convents, which
often functioned, as shown by Pomata, as centres of physical and religious
2On the home as place for work and business in Renaissance Italy, F. Franceschi ‘Business activities’ in M.
Ajmar-Wollheim and F. Dennis (eds.), At Home in Renaissance Italy (London, 2006), 166–71; S. Cavallo, ‘The
artisan’s casa’, in ibid., 70–1, 74.
3Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600 (New Haven, 2005),
Chapter Five.
Spaces, objects and identities in early modern Italian medicine 3
healing, were also often endowed with pharmacies where nuns produced
and sold drugs.4 In those convents, like the Corpus Domini in Bologna,
which hosted the un-decayed body of a saint, the nuns also supplied the
community with healing objects related to the saint’s body: her cowl, the
washcloth, the carpet kept under her feet. Law courts are another space
where women performed important medical roles: in canonization trials
secular gentlewomen were entrusted with the task to inspect those parts of
the female saint’s body which, for reasons of decency, male doctors could
not see and then report to the court; midwives and lay women, as shown by
Cohen, acted regularly as expert witnesses in legal proceedings concerning
abortions, miscarriages and infanticides.
Investigating a case of miscarriage, Cohen uncovers precious evidence to
illustrate the extent to which medical care was entrusted to lay women in
households of middling rank: for weeks it was female neighbours and a wet-
nurse who took care of the patient, only when the miscarriage had taken
place a midwife was summoned, with the specific task of removing the dead
foetus; a male practitioner was called in only when the conditions of the
patient had become life-threatening. Hence, women without a social identity
as ‘healers’ turn out to be important ‘medical agents’:5 by contrast, not only
the role of the male practitioner appears to be very limited but the territory
of the female professional, the midwife, turns out to be restricted to specific,
specialised functions. As well as throwing new light on the relationship
between household care and professional care in relation to a female patient
of modest social background, this case is therefore relevant to the debated
issue of female competence in questions of reproductive knowledge.6 More-
over, Cohen’s detailed investigation of one specific case provides interesting
evidence to document the long-denied involvement of husbands, and, more
generally, of male acquaintances (the shop-boy, the neighbour, the fellow
countryman) in women’s pregnancies, another area which is attracting
increasing scholarly attention.7
The role of women appears to have been crucial also in the running of
the apothecary’s shop and of similar health-related establishments. The high
compensation demanded by the confectioner Rossi for the loss of his wife’s
managerial and productive abilities demonstrates the appreciation in which
4See for example G. Pomata, ‘Practicing Between Earth and Heaven: Women Healers in Early Modern
Bologna’, in Dynamis, 19 (1999), 119–44.
5The expression ‘medical agents’ has been recently used by Monica Green to refer to those who were not
formal medical practitioners but ‘acted as agents of health’ in contexts in which ‘formal medical titles were
not used’. M. Green ‘Bodies, gender, health, disease: recent work on medieval women’s medicine’, Studies in
Medieval and Renaissance History, 4 (2007), 12–17.
6S. Broomhall, Women’s Medical Work in Early Modern France (Manchester, 2004), Chapter 8, and Green,
‘Bodies, gender, health, disease’, 15–19. For a full discussion of ‘women healers beyond midwives’ see Mary
Fissell, ‘Women, Health and Healing in Early Modern Europe: An Introduction’, Bulletin of the History of
Medicine, 1 (2008) and articles therein.
7See for example U. Rublack ‘Pregnancy, childbirth and the female body in early modern Germany’, Past
and Present, 150 (1996), 84–110.