Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (review)

For many scholars, the Renaissance charlatan exists as either a trickster or a quack. Associated with the street performer and the court jester, the charlatan holds a more revered place in studies of drama, which celebrate his wit and industry, than he does in histories of medicine. The latter tend to inflate the differences between vernacular and learned medical traditions, locating this supposedly impotent practitioner on the margins of both. In his new study, however, David Gentilcore exposes the many oversights and inaccuracies that have supported these assumptions. From a wide range of sources — visual, literary, historical, archival — he demonstrates that the charlatan was a successful businessman and a recognized healer. The charlatan embodied the entrepreneurial spirit that underpinned the growing mercantile economy in early modern Italy; and in the marketplace he emphasized (often with dramatic flair) his practices, knowledge, and experience in order to build his reputation as a legitimate source of medical care.

This study contributes to the history of medicine and its nascent reconsideration of the relationship between vernacular and learned medicine. Gentilcore consistently underscores the charlatan's ability to navigate the regulatory bureaucracies, run in part by elite, learned practitioners, that sought to control wide swaths of early modern health care. Unlike apothecaries, who were governed by the regulations for guilds, the charlatan developed clever strategies not only to produce, but also to market, his wares. His success depended on flexible pricing and creative packaging, rather than merely enhancing the taste of bitter remedies. He also adopted stage names to celebrate regional affiliation or exotic origins. As a result, not only did the charlatan's commitment to empirical inquiry enhance the practices associated with materia medica, but his activities also provide a template for itinerant medical practitioners in the eighteenth century and beyond.

The book is divided into three sections. Based on visual and written sources, the first section shows how the remedy-seller, tooth-drawer, and snake-handler were used to represent and categorize the charlatan. Serving a wide range of clients, much wider than learned physicians, the charlatan was also and increasingly the subject of regulation. Based on the records of the protomedicati of Italian cities, which granted or denied licenses to charlatans for the manufacture and distribution of their goods and services, the second section explores how medical authorities shaped the different aspects of charlatanism, including medical knowledge, peddling, popular entertainment, and practical alchemy. The third section focuses on the charlatan's modes of communication through travel, staged performance, and print. In addition to mapping travel patterns and exploring regional identity, this section catalogues the charlatan's routines, which consisted of tricks (especially with horses and snakes), boasts, master-servant conflicts, and other scenarios closely aligned with the commedia dell'arte. Gentilcore combines these formal elements with aspects of audience reception. Historically situated, these analyses reveal that if the charlatan's tried-and-true remedies were central to his early success, his ability to market innovative medicines became crucial to his later success and, eventually, to his ability to specialize his trade, for example, on tooth extraction, radical empiricism, or remedies for venereal disease.

This study combines economic, intellectual, literary, and social history. It puts into practice an innovative and useful methodology, one that grapples with the incomplete and biased nature of the archive and views the status of a representation as dynamic rather than static and determined. The methodology could have been grounded more substantially in the introduction: at seven pages, the introduction provides, in addition to a summary of the chapters, only a brief, eclectic review of methodological influences. Nevertheless, it is especially productive when used in the third section to illuminate the dialectical development of the charlatan's staged antics and the habits and expectations of the audience. By the end of the seventeenth century, elite spectators were less likely to appear in public with non-elites, and more likely to attend private forms of entertainment; and this...