Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800

Seven: Styles of Medical Antiquarianism

207 Between the fifteenth and the early seventeenth century, learned physicians quite frequently turned their attention to aspects of antiquity and, in some instances, types of sources more usually thought of as the province of antiquaries: social customs, institutions, and the evidence of material as well as textual remains. While the aspect of Renaissance medical antiquarianism that is most readily recognizable may be its association with humanistic erudition, I think it deserves to be emphasized that in this period there was often also a practical side to medical interest in antiquity. Reasons that some Renaissance physicians advanced for engaging with antiquarian studies included the idea that knowledge of ancient society and institutions would result in fuller understanding of valued ancient medical texts, or that ancient responses to health issues taught useful lessons, whether for imitation or avoidance. The pursuit of antiquarian learning by physicians even in fields unrelated to medicine might also be quite practical in the sense that it could be a route to professional advancement in particular social and cultural settings. Accordingly, in this brief essay I propose to consider a few examples that may shed some light on patterns of opportunity, methodology, and motivation in the involvement of physicians with antiquarianism.1 Yet it should be said at the outset that physicians expressed their interest in antiquity and antiquities in such diverse ways that the expression “medical antiquarianism” cannot be made to refer to any single, coherent, or well-defined methodology or body of knowledge. In the first place, a number of physicians addressed aspects of antiquity unconseven Styles of Medical Antiquarianism Nancy G. Siraisi 208 Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China nected to medicine, health, or disease. Indeed, one of the most important early examples of the antiquarian impulse to record and depict the monuments of ancient Rome was the work of a physician, namely the famous collection of descriptions and drawings assembled in the 1460s by Giovanni Marcanova, professor of medicine at Padua and later Bologna.2 In the next century, works on antiquity by physicians include—among others—treatises on the Roman consuls and the ancient Batavi, as well as a whole series of writings on ancient peoples, places, and institutions by Wolfgang Lazius, imperial medicus et historicus, to whom I shall return shortly.3 Secondly, when one turns to medical books, the list of all the topics that sixteenth-century authors were likely to treat in ways that might in the broadest sense be considered antiquarian is too lengthy to enumerate , much less discuss, in a short article. To name only a few, such a list would include accounts of the origins of medicine, the history of particular medicinal ingredients or remedies, or of ancient outbreaks of disease, biographies of ancient physicians, accounts of ancient medical practices such as incubation, and descriptions of ancient diet and physical culture .4 Of course, the primary approach to ancient medicine remained the analysis and occasional critique of the standard ancient medical texts that still constituted the foundation of medical knowledge. Nevertheless, sixteenth-century learned physicians were on the whole more likely than their thirteenth- to fifteenth-century predecessors to show interest in ancient cultural practices and social arrangements related to medicine and health and in so doing to take into consideration evidence from outside medicine. That evidence came predominantly from historical and literary texts but also on occasion from archaeological sources. In this respect, the Roman physician and professor of medicine Andrea Bacci was probably fairly typical. He assured readers of his work on ancient dining habits that his work was based on both literary and archaeological sources, although it seems clear that in this as in other instances the literary sources—described by Bacci as a “vast forest”—predominated.5 Thirdly, although both the participation of medical men in the broader humanistic culture and aspects of medicine itself (notably the inescapable presence of at least some measure of empiricism, narrative, and attention to particulars) undoubtedly combined to foster historical interests among them, those interests did not necessarily take the form of study of material culture, customs, and so on. Interest in the past might just as easily lead a physician to embark on writing history of one kind or another—as the very different examples of Dr. Hartman Styles of Medical Antiquarianism 209 Schedel, author of the Nuremberg Chronicle, and Dr. Alessandro Benedetti, author of the Diaria de bello carolino, among...