Doctors, Ambassadors, and Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy (review)

This book investigates the relationship between humanism and the professions of doctor, ambassador, and secretary in the Italian Renaissance. It is divided into three parts, each composed of two chapters. While the first chapter of each part offers a series of case studies that help reconstruct how each profession was viewed in the Renaissance, the remaining chapters focus on a single individual who "was influenced by his professional practice, or whose work as a humanist helped fashion the way a profession was viewed" (p. 18). Douglas Biow prefaces these chapters with an introductory analysis of Petrarch's coronation oration and his rise as a professional poet, which serves to introduce some of the themes addressed in the remaining six chapters. Readers of the Bulletin will be particularly interested in this opening chapter and in the first part of the book, as both deal extensively with physicians and medicine. Therefore I shall concentrate on these two sections.

The first chapter of the first part offers a sophisticated analysis of three very diverse authors: the scholastic doctor Gentile da Foligno, the protohumanist Giovanni Boccaccio, and the humanist philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Drawing on some of the best scholarship in the history of medicine, Biow explores the literature on plague written during and after the devastating epidemics of the 1340s and 1350s. He begins with the famous physician, commentator, and teacher Gentile da Foligno, who died of plague in 1348 while trying to fight the disease. What attracted the author to the study of Gentile is his rather atypical view of plague as a marvel—a theme to which Biow returns throughout the book.

He then turns to Boccaccio's treatment of the plague, with the focus again on marvel and wonder. Here Biow concentrates on the adventures of Maestro Simone, a young Bolognese physician, who moves to Florence and is hurled into fecal matter by another character in the story. He takes this story as representative of Boccaccio's own negative opinion of doctors, whom he sees as unable to treat plague, and whose greed he seems to condemn. In support of this interpretation Biow quotes from the introduction to the first day of the Decameron where Boccaccio recalls the appearance of the plague in Florence, and the inefficacy of the physicians' cures. While the author reads this passage as a negative comment against all physicians, Boccaccio's remarks about the celestial origin of the disease (which he credits either to the influence of the stars or to the punitive intervention of God), and the miraculous way (miracolosa maniera) in which it operates, seem almost to suggest that no cure is humanly possible. Furthermore, Boccaccio's use of the three distinctive terms medici,scienziati, and medicanti (the latter including "women as well as men that never had any instruction in medicine") indicates that he maintains a crucial distinction between quacks and learned physicians. Possibly on the basis of Petrarch's hostility toward the medical profession (which he discusses extensively in the introductory chapter), Biow seems to overstate Boccaccio's negative characterization of physicians, which, he is forced to admit, "is striking given the degree to which [Boccaccio] made use of medical concepts throughout the Decameron" (p. 57). As he notices, Boccaccio's admiration for honest physicians is clearly exemplified by another physician in the Decameron, the wise Maestro Alberto (pp. 63-64).

The concluding part of this chapter is dedicated to Ficino's Consilio contro la pestilenzia. What makes Ficino particularly interesting is the fact that he successfully embodies the combination of the two professions: he is both a humanist and a physician. By his time we witness a growing integration of humanism and medicine, the most remarkable example of this trend being the medical humanist Nicolò Leoniceno.

The second chapter of the first part is entirely dedicated to Girolamo Fracastoro. Here Biow relies on some of the finest scholarly literature on the subject to offer a...