History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning

3. Life Writing and Disciplinary History

Chapter Three LIFE WRITING AND DISCIPLINARY HISTORY ccording to Laurent Joubert, the Montpellier physician and naturalist Guillaume Rondelet made learning fun: “He taught in a very humorous way, and held his audience with anecdotes [historiis] and fables, but his teaching was extremely thorough and comprehensive.” This vivid glimpse of a successful Renaissance medical professor in action comes from Joubert’s biography of his former teacher.1 It is thus part of a vast penumbra of Renaissance and early modern writing surrounding medicine, much of it devoted in one way or another to commemorating the past of the discipline and the lives of its great men. In celebratory and memorial orations, in bibliographies and biographies, in reference works, and in histories of varying scope, authors— many of them physicians—recalled the origins and development of medicine as a discipline and the achievements of famous physicians of antiquity (and occasionally the Middle Ages). And they gave unprecedented attention to the lives of recent and contemporary medical men. This outpouring of biographical and historical writing about medicine and physicians includes one of the classics of autobiography, Girolamo Cardano’s De vita propria, with its revelations about the author’s turbulent family life, strange dreams, beliefs in omens, and conviction of his own special gifts, as well as its rich social tapestry of life in Spanish Milan.2 Few other Renaissance accounts of individual medical lives or narratives of medicine’s past are even remotely as striking as Cardano’s exercise in selfrevelation (or self-fashioning). Yet between the ‹fteenth and the seventeenth 106 A centuries, these branches of medical literature—or, rather, writing about medicine—constituted a notable point of intersection between medicine, biography, and history. As this chapter will show, medical ‹gures shared to the full, as both authors and subjects, in the striking development of life writing that occurred during this period.3 The greatest number of medical lives and accounts of medicine’s past probably appeared in encyclopedic works or ceremonial contexts. But some late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century medical lives (e.g., Joubert’s life of Rondelet) can be characterized as fully developed and nuanced professional biography, and some writings about the past of medicine moved toward newer types of disciplinary history and histories of the sciences. Thus, the physician and bibliographer Gabriel Naudé, with whom the discussion in this chapter will end, used oratory, biography, and innovative forms of intellectual history to evaluate aspects of medicine’s past. medical lives and renaissance life writing Beginning in the ‹fteenth century and still more markedly in the sixteenth, records of personal experience and achievement and explorations of individual character multiplied in autobiographical and biographical writings of many kinds produced by authors from many walks of life. The expansion of biography re›ected both the response to a changing social, intellectual, and economic environment and an enlarged appreciation of the range of ancient biography and doxography.4 Humanist authors could draw not only on Suetonius and Valerius Maximus, known throughout the Middle Ages, but also on “new” ancient models and inspiration for different types of secular biographical writing—most notably Plutarch for political and military ‹gures and Theophrastus for “characters,” that is, personality types.5 Similarly, although various collections of anecdotes about and sayings attributed to ancient philosophers (and physicians) were widely disseminated in the later Middle Ages, full access to Diogenes Laertius yielded one of the most extensive ancient examples of writing about the lives and opinions of learned men.6 With access to Plutarch, some writers preserved his distinction between biography and history, but for the most part Renaissance humanists and their early modern successors considered lives a branch of history. According to Francis Bacon, lives were one of three kinds of “perfect history” (the others being chronicles and relations of particular historical episodes).7 Two generations later, Daniel Georg Morhof similarly de‹ned biography as part of history , asserted that lives offered both example and precept, and particularly Life Writing and Disciplinary History
107 stressed the instructive value of lives of “philosophers, jurists, physicians, and politici, . . . [from which] we learn many things relating to those sciences.”8 Medicine, as Arnaldo Momigliano remarked, by de‹nition always involved some level of empirical interest in individual human lives.9 The many physicians who turned to biography did not all con‹ne themselves to writing medical lives. Giovanni Garzoni (ca. 1428–1505), a medical practitioner and, for almost...