The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (review)

Requisite prepublication praise on the dust jacket calls this book “the liveliest of works” on Cardano—a grand understatement, for the phrase calls for comparison just with books about the great Renaissance physician, rather than with the best on the subject of Renaissance medicine. In ten chapters (which are paired under five headings in five “parts”), Siraisi characterizes Cardano’s medical work and contextualizes it. She begins with his self-presentation as a practitioner and places his accounts of himself in the context of the Italian cities where he practiced medicine. Part 2 (“Theory and Practice”) deals primarily with his conceptual framework in medicine (particularly his project of identifying medical “contradictions” and publishing them), and then turns to one area of practical application—namely, his work on diet. Part 3 (“The Old and the New”) shows how in the area of anatomy Cardano blended what he thought the best of the old anatomy, Hippocrates, with the new, Vesalius. Part 4 (“Medical Wonders”) presents Cardano’s ideas of occult forces in nature: his belief in his personal gifts (clustered around subtlety as the key term) and his notions about the prophetic quality of certain dreams. In Part 5 (“Medical Narratives”), Siraisi discusses Cardano’s attention to medical narratives: his collecting of case histories of his patients, as well as his way of referring to his own health history. While she points out that he used personal narrative throughout his life, and that the thematic arrangement of her book therefore is not in a narrow sense chronological, she insists that “the arrangement does . . . mirror one kind of development in Renaissance medicine” (p. 22)—namely, from the subversion of scholastic arguments at the beginning to narratives of experience.

Absolutely invaluable in this book are the repeated attempts at contextualizing Cardano’s works in different areas of medicine. These usually take the form of minihistories of genres of medical writing: books on “controversies,” diet books, books on dreams, de mirandis literature, and forms of medical narrative (including medical consilia). There is no concession here to “fashionable” tastes of early modern cultural historians with their predilection for sexuality, gender, or the plight of the disempowered, although Siraisi of course builds on studies of material culture and expresses her indebtedness to them. As indicated by her subtitle, she unabashedly thinks of the period as “Renaissance,” ignoring present ideological divisions between those who work in the “Renaissance” and the self-styled antielitists who think of themselves as working in early modern studies. She uses the term “early modern” only once, and then somewhat loosely (on p. 71: “in the Renaissance and early modern period”). Thus, in spite of all the innovative edge of this book (particularly the emphasis on Cardano’s self-fashioning in narrative), there is something almost charmingly old-historicist about it. It is full of quotations from works not easily accessible (or not at all accessible) in English, and the English translations of those passages (given in Latin in the very complete endnotes) are reliable.

With all its learning, this book reads extremely well. There are even occasional touches of humor: when commenting on Cardano’s avoidance of patients with certain preexisting conditions, Siraisi is reminded of the language of modern American medical insurance (p. 36); she reports that, “like most of us,” Cardano had only limited success in putting his dietary theories into personal practice (p. 71); and, when noting that he found Vesalius’s manner of presentation rough and brief, she opines that “Cardano must surely be the only person ever to have found the more than six hundred folio pages of labyrinthine Latin prose in the first edition of the Fabrica excessively succinct” (p. 109).

Siraisi’s deliberate limitation of her scope to Cardano’s medical works (almost half of his published output) is unquestionably wise, although it has the unfortunate consequence that Julius Caesar Scaliger (who attempted to refute one of Cardano’s other works point by point...