The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy (review)

William Eamon won acclaim for his first monograph, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton University Press, 1994), when it was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His new work, The Professor of Secrets, also holds to his high standards for being both interesting and readable for the general public while at the same time being meticulously researched for the scholar. He goes so far as to appear to have no notes—but they are there, for scholars and general readers alike, clearly laid out by page for individual references in the back.

The book reads much like a novel and each time I began to wonder how Eamon might presume to know what his main character—the historic Leonardo Fioravanti—was thinking or feeling, I would find that the words Eamon was quoting or paraphrasing were Fioravanti’s. Eamon explains in his introduction that Fioravanti thought quite highly of himself and that at times “[I] found myself frowning in disbelief at how brazenly he [Fioravanti] would exaggerate, hide, or make the same facts serve different ends as the occasion suited him” (12).

Cleverly, Eamon uses Fioravanti’s life as a guide for the reader to Renaissance science, including medicine, alchemy, and other “secrets.” Fioravanti was widely read in medicine, which during his time overlapped with all areas of science, philosophy, and what scholars now call pseudosciences. Because of this expertise, he, like other well-read dabblers into science and medicine of the Renaissance, became known as a “professor of secrets.” Through Fioravanti’s eyes, then, the reader experiences Renaissance Italian culture as well as the scientific and medical social circles of the age.

As the book progresses through its thirty-four chapters—which sounds like a lot, but like a good novel, none are long and all begin and end with a punch—Eamon weaves in other primary source quotations about syphilis (the French Pox or Neapolitan disease), bubonic plague, eye disorders, and many other historic medical catastrophes. The reader follows Fioravanti from Bologna to Genoa, Sicily, Florence, Rome, Pesaro, Naples, Venice, and other cities and towns throughout Italy. Among many other better-known historic figures, Fioravanti saw Andreas Vesalius perform an autopsy in Bologna; he met Cosimo de’Medici and “glimpsed” Prince Philip of Spain.

Fioravanti became controversial at the height of his career because of his radical stance against traditional and accepted Galenic medicine. Fioravanti wrote, “When I saw an anatomy done, . . . I never saw phlegm, choler, melancholy, or vital spirits, or any of those other fabulous things that the physicians dream up. I saw the tongue, lungs, heart, liver . . . but I never saw those imaginary things. How can we believe in things that are occult, things we can’t see or touch?” (45). Fioravanti began to search for a panacea. “Leonardo was not claiming that he had discovered the philosopher’s stone—the one sought by alchemical philosophers since antiquity. Rather, his was a trade name that he had invented by analogy with alchemy” (207). This “branding” or metaphor that Fioravanti used, Eamon points out, was as important a discovery as any. Fioravanti had learned that to sell something, one needed to tap into the “mood of the times” (208). Fioravanti became famous for a decade or more, a celebrity among social circles and medical professionals alike.

Fioravanti was denounced to the College of Physicians “for malpractice” in 1568. He returned to his native Bologna, “applied for doctorates in arts and medicine,” and “the University of Bologna awarded him the degrees” (246). Fioravanti passed his examinations without much effort, it seems. Fioravanti touted “true medicine” after his degrees, but continued his experiments in finding a panacea. He tested herbs and foods from Amerigo’s World—things like tobacco, and possibly chocolate. Fioravanti continued to medically experiment with all kinds of other things—organic and...