Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy (review)

David Gentilcore. Healers and Healing in Early Modern Italy. Social and Cultural Values in Early Modern Europe. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1998. xiii + 240 pp. Ill. $79.95.

This book collects seven studies of the medical world in the Kingdom of Naples during the early modern period--roughly, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The author's attention ranges from the organization of the medical world to the structures of medication organization to an examination of symbolic structures in which patients made sense of their illness, in each case trying to trace the options for healing disease that were available. He uses each essay to emphasize the "medical pluralism" (p. x) that characterized that world, describing the increased involvement of secular and ecclesiastical authorities in classifying medical practitioners to evoke the interaction between popular, ecclesiastic, and learned medical communities.

In this medical world, the therapeutic options that were presented to the ill were diverse, but not incompatible with one another. Popular charlatans were tolerated by medical authorities for the suitability of their expertise; physicians trusted the apothecaries who provided relics that would cure diseases to work within the parameters of available therapeutic options; ecclesiastical institutions sought to distance themselves from popular remedies that seemed tinged by the supernatural, but priests would engage in exorcism, and mystical "living saints" offered cures where doctors failed; in some instances, university-trained physicians were even called upon to confirm such otherworldly cures. In such a setting, Gentilcore sees the distinctions between popular and educated medicine, or popular and elite culture, as unhelpful to understanding the notions of "illness," "remedy," and "health" with which individuals lived.

In the second half of the book, Gentilcore examines the intermediate place of healing within the ecclesiastical, popular, and educated realms in the Kingdom of Naples and the Italian states. Against the background of the increased disciplinary division of medical practitioners, the decrees of the Council of Trent (1563), he argues, highlighted relations of different practitioners to one another. The decrees led to the suppression of magical cures judged to be diabolical and forced orders to consult physicians who could confirm the miraculous cures of holy women and men. In such scenarios, he argues, established "healers mediated between a social demand for the prevention and treatment of illness and a more or less esoteric corpus of knowledge" (p. 88). In this pluralistic setting, patients acquired an increased awareness of a heterogeneous array of therapeutic alternatives, even as governments attempted to regulate the provision of public health. Apparent contradictions arose in the way that these worlds were allowed to coexist, since professional interests were simply defined in different ways. Physicians would provide confirmation of medical miracles, even though such affirmation might undercut their own professional authority (pp. 187-91). Charlatans were allowed to practice side by side with medical elites as a way to mediate between literate and illiterate cultures, largely because the remedies that they offered were often in fact quite similar (p. 111).

This had consequences for the different ways in which disease might be conceived, and the remedies that the ill might pursue. Gentilcore's sensitivity to the dimensions of healers' relations to patients and to the construction of illness will be of interest to the specialist. His good eye for anecdotal archival detail that enriches the book and complements his claims makes the book a mine of information for experts and students of early modern medicine. In the last two essays of the volume, he examines the large role of the miraculous in early modern narratives of illness. He states that the value of physicians' testimony at trials of canonization is emblematic of a situation in which the ecclesiastical, popular, and professional coexist--a paradigm for medical practice that changed only with the emergence of hospitals as centers of medical education in the eighteenth century.

These essays, taken together, suggests that neither the narrative of professionalization nor...