L'esperienza del passato: Alessandro Benedetti, filologo e medico umanista

Giovanna Ferrari has written more than an intellectual biography of Alessandro Benedetti (1452–1512), a physician of the Italian Renaissance whose work has been largely ignored. She has prepared more than a commentary to Benedetti’s two principal works, the Anatomice (1502) and his critical edition of Pliny’s Naturalis historia (1507). Her work, in fact, provides profound insights into the mentalité of Renaissance Italy and its humanist intellectuals. It also helps to explain why physicians around 1500 failed to make much progress over their medieval predecessors, despite some promising new approaches such as Benedetti’s anatomical study.

Ferrari traces Benedetti’s early education in his native Verona, his university years at Padua, and his professional life in his adopted home, the Venetian Republic. His new city-state offered him the opportunity to visit former territories of the Byzantine Empire—Modone, Crete, and the islands of the Aegean—where he amassed an impressive collection of Greek manuscripts. After returning to Venice, he served as a physician for the Republic’s armed forces. Ferrari ignores Benedetti’s private life, beyond a brief description of his will and the heirs he instituted.

A study of Benedetti’s major works would be interesting if for no other reason than that he flourished in such a fascinating age: he was a contemporary of Christopher Columbus, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Nicolò Machiavelli. However, he also merits study for his achievements in anatomy and in philological research. According to Ferrari, Benedetti’s work on anatomy is significant for the history of medicine because in many ways it prefigured the more famous study by Andreas Vasalius, published in 1543. Benedetti held that progress in medicine demanded that physicians turn from the study of ancient texts and medieval Arabic manuals to devote their efforts to the study of nature. Careful autopsies could win true knowledge and resolve many conflicts between the anatomical theories of Aristotle and Galen.

Benedetti asserted that the problem with autopsies was not the method of observing the body directly, but the language used to describe the shape, character, and function of the organs revealed by the anatomist—that is, the rhetoric employed to record what was seen. Ferrari stresses that Benedetti was too much a humanist and philologist to depend on carefully drawn illustrations to reflect what he uncovered in his autopsies. He believed that the words of one who had carefully studied the human body provided a better vision of anatomical reality than any artist could achieve by drawing. Ferrari suggests that Benedetti was aware of Leonardo da Vinci’s attempts to illustrate the human anatomy.

Benedetti thought that the human body was more complicated than physicians believed, and he was convinced that anomalies in the body as well as peculiar clinical cases provided opportunities to learn more and should not be ignored simply because they did not fit the theories of the ancients. His fascination with exceptional cases and his criticism of Galen were two reasons why influential contemporaries such as Nicolò Leoniceno rejected him as an unreliable physician and philosopher. As a result of such attacks, Benedetti’s Anatomice was not widely read in Italy, although Leonardo da Vinci owned a copy.

Benedetti’s interest in establishing an accurate medical vocabulary led him to his second great project, an edition of Pliny’s Historia naturalis. Benedetti thought that solving the many philological problems in this lengthy text would help establish a standard Latin terminology in medicine and botany.

In conclusion, Ferrari has written an excellent monograph that manages to discuss a very specific subject while dealing with major issues, not only regarding the history of medicine, but regarding the origins of modern science.