The Beggar and the Professor: A Sixteenth-Century Family Saga

Professor Le Roy Ladurie is well known for fashioning brilliant “total history” out of social-economic-cultural subjects. Along the way he has been drawn to the broad context of premodern health, famine, and epidemic disease. The book under review here continues that interest, being the English translation of the first half of a new two-volume work on the medically oriented Platter family of sixteenth-century Switzerland.

In leisurely style, Le Roy Ladurie chronicles the career paths, travels, and family life of a Platter father and son, with occasional asides on the life of another son from a late, second marriage. Thomas Platter (1499–1582), self-made “Renaissance man” and “médecin manqué” (pp. 55, 63), rose meteorically from mere country cowherd to ropemaker, printer of Calvin’s greatest work, and schoolteacher/professor of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek at the University of Basel. His more privileged son, Felix (1536–1614), spent five formative years in training at the eminent medical center of the University of Montpellier, and later became town physician at Basel. The two men wrote copiously about everything and everyone they met at their various Swiss locales and on the road in Germany, Austria, and France. So focused was their attention on the health, illnesses, and medical practices of family, friends, and acquaintances that one would have wished for an extended, probing discussion instead of a meandering narrative. Thomas Platter, Sr., devoted 7 percent of his lengthy autobiography to the description of a plague outbreak in 1531, which has fascinating material—even for those of us who have studied that disease extensively. Le Roy Ladurie apportions six pages to the episode, with the curious comment that “these few plague-ridden weeks . . . occupy a disproportionate place in Thomas’s narrative” (p. 55).

Fortunately, the detailed index accompanying Arthur Goldhammer’s colloquial translation will guide the reader to nuggets of information on the many plague epidemics that swirled around the lives of the Platter families, on Thomas’s indirect encounters with medical lore through association with physician, surgeon, and apothecary friends, and on Felix’s formal training at Montpellier and five-stage examination for his medical degree at Basel. (See the index entries for Medicine, Plague, Epiphanius, Jeckelmann, Oporinus, Paracelsus, Vesalius, and the many subheadings under Thomas Platter, Sr., and Felix Platter.) The Platters’ journals, memoirs, and letters can also be consulted in their original German dialect and in a wide range of translations into various languages, as noted in Le Roy Ladurie’s impressive notes and exhaustive bibliography.

Several reflections on how early modern people looked at disease come from my reading of this book. First, practical medical education was as important as formal university training, and Le Roy Ladurie provides considerable information on both—with only a trace of the curt dismissal of popular and learned medical cures found in his earlier work (see p. 49). Second, the social-professional networks of the Platter father and son are fascinating and important, though the author’s overarching (and unsubstantiated) postulate that the Platters favored the medical profession primarily for its entrée to high society and wealth is undercut by Thomas’s innate medical curiosity and love of dissecting (p. 114). Third, the presence of plague was a frequent feature of life, and the most moving parts of this book evoke harrowing plague scares and Platter family tragedies. Fourth, there is the ambivalence of people in the shadow of plague—those who stayed and helped, those who fled; but was there personal cowardice, as Le Roy Ladurie claims?

On the disease of plague itself, some of the author’s narration requires an explication de texte. For example, he reports several buboes on thighs, and once on Thomas’s knee (p. 273), rather than the lymph-adjacent groin, neck, and armpits. Young Margretlin...