Umanesimo e Medicina: Il Problema dell ''Individuale" (review)

This slim volume of three papers is the product of a conference held 3–4 June 1994 at San Gimignano. All three papers, published in Italian, treat the medical writings of important Italian medical scholars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the first, Chiara Crisciani describes the development of the medical consilium between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In its origins, the medical consilium was a short treatise that described the patient and his complaints, diagnosed the illness, and prescribed a general regimen as well as a precise treatment for the patient. As Crisciani states, it combined theory and practice. However, in the course of the fifteenth century, the consilium distanced itself from the patient. Using the consilia of Bartolomeo Montagnana for evidence, Crisciani points out that the writer rarely visited the patient but nevertheless wrote a detailed analysis of the disease. Such consilia listed all the possibilities (subdivided into logical sections) and cited numerous authorities, but seldom offered prognoses. In other words, the consilium became a miniature Scholastic treatise. One might also hazard the view that the medical consilium increasingly resembled the legal consilium, although Crisciani does not make this point. She argues, not very convincingly, that the consilium became individualistic in that it became an extremely detailed analysis of all the possibilities. In any case, the article offers a brief but interesting survey of the subject.

In the second study, Nancy G. Siraisi demonstrates how two medical scholars paid more attention to the individual and particular in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, albeit in very different ways. Antonio Benivieni (d. 1502), known for his pioneering work in postmortem pathology, came from Florentine humanistic circles and was also influenced by Girolamo Savonarola, the fiery reformer of Florence. In describing cases, Benivieni adopted a narrative approach that accepted miraculous individual cures. Interested in results, he left behind the impersonal analyses of consilia. Girolamo Cardano, by contrast, rejected miracles, but accepted mirabilia—loosely defined as extraordinary medical occurrences stemming from natural occult causes. In the three short treatises examined by Siraisi, Cardano adopted a narrative approach featuring a rich social context. He also boasted that he cured patients whom other physicians could not help. Siraisi concludes that both Benivieni and Cardano rejected the analytic approach of the consilia in favor of a narrative approach. She attributes the change to the influence of humanism.

Graziella Federici Vescovini examines Michele Savonarola’s Speculum physiognomiae (1465), never printed and little studied, but revealing of Savonarola’s medical thought. In it Savonarola attempted to make physiognomy into a scientific discipline of the human psyche. According to Savonarola, with physiognomy one may understand the secrets of the psyche through external bodily signs: physiognomy reflects the entire organism, offering recognition of the psyche and the general state of health of the individual. Much influenced by Pietro d’Abano’s Compilatio physionomiae (1295), Savonarola saw celestial spirits as strongly shaping the human being. He also argued that menstrual blood played a key role in the formation of the embryo and its psyche, a view at variance with that of Aristotle. Vescovini does not claim that Savonarola’s work was profound, but that it was an interesting step in the evolution of physiognomy.

All three articles are well supported by references to the original sources and substantial bibliographies. Only Siraisi’s article clearly addresses what one might call medical individualism in the Renaissance—but all are worth reading.