History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning

2. History and Histories in Medical Texts

Chapter Two HISTORY AND HISTORIES IN MEDICAL TEXTS For even though the word “history” may simply mean “narrative” in Greek, really it is certain that there are three kinds of history: divine, natural, and human. Divine history is that in which sacred things are related, as is the case with the sacred books or Bible. Natural history is found in such books as Aristotle’s History of Animals, Theophrastus’s History of Plants, and Pliny’s Natural History. Human history is found in those books that relate either the actions of people or the nature of the human soul (just as Aristotle called his book On the Soul a history), or the whole structure of the human body. hese words introduce not (as one might imagine) one of the many Renaissance treatises on the ars historica but a medical commentary. They appear at the beginning of Girolamo Mercuriale’s exposition of the case histories in books 1 and 3 of the Hippocratic Epidemics. Although his formulation reads like a direct echo of Bodin’s famous threefold classi‹cation of history into divine, natural, and human, Mercuriale gave it a decidedly medical twist when he made human history include psychology and anatomy as well as past events.1 Not only that, he went some way toward adding the Hippocratic case histories as a fourth category. He explained that although accounts of cases found in works of Galen as well as in the Hippocratic Epidemics did not fall under one of the three categories named and were thus not “precisely” histories, they were nevertheless a form of truthful narrative and 63 T were approved by Galen. What distinguished the Hippocratic histories, according to Mercuriale, was that Hippocrates’ narratives—unlike those of “other historians” (aliorum historicorum), who related all the contingent circumstances —“never told everything.” He illustrated his contention by comparing Hippocrates and Thucydides: the latter recorded everything about the plague of Athens, even things well known to uneducated people, whereas Hippocrates (assumed to be referring to the same epidemic) left out many things but included insights unknown to the ignorant. Because the comparison had originally been suggested by Galen, it is also one of many examples of Galen’s own interest in history.2 History found its way into Renaissance medicine in many guises. Chapter 1 of this book traced the medical response to a historical concept with physiological and anatomical implications. This chapter examines genres of medical writing notably hospitable to narratives, records, or exempla from the human past (individual or collective) in such forms as stories of patients and disease, anecdotes about ancient physicians, or references to general history and historians—all of which are adumbrated in Mercuriale’s remarks about history, histories, Hippocrates, and Thucydides. Traditions of medical learning, practical needs of medicine, and the general in›uence of humanistic education all contributed to a growing attention to many kinds of history in medical writings. The word historia itself, which connoted for Renaissance authors an account of the results of an inquiry, whether into nature or into the human past (so that descriptions of physiological processes, anatomical formations, and, later, investigative procedures were also often termed historiae), linked areas of knowledge that later centuries came to regard as wholly distinct.3 In addition to being heirs of a disciplinary and scienti ‹c tradition resting on ancient texts ascribed to revered founders, physicians were also practitioners, who assembled and drew on exempla and narratives of experience (their own and those of their predecessors) for professional purposes. And they were simultaneously participants in a broader humanist community in which civil and religious history were, along with antiquities, increasingly a focus of intellectual attention. Undoubtedly, all these ways of understanding and making use of the past could and did intersect, with the proportions of the mix differing in individual cases. This chapter’s analysis of genres and individual works that represent the presence of histories of the human past in Renaissance medical writing—collections of cases or topical essays, autopsy reports, one branch of Hippocratic commentary, and a single plague treatise—is highly selective. Indeed, a simi64
History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning lar investigation of other genres of medical literature (e.g., works on anatomy and surgery or commentaries on books of Galen), which could not be attempted here, might add further evidence. No attempt has been made here to survey incidental historical material in medical books...