The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy (review)

The prospective readership for this study is the general public and undoubtedly also students being introduced to Renaissance history and the history of medicine in Renaissance Italy. Eamon focuses on the figure of Leonardo Fioravanti, a medical practitioner, experimenter, alchemist, "professor of secrets," and prolific author. Leonardo traveled throughout Italy during the mid- and late sixteenth century, practicing medicine according to his own original regimes, advertising balsams, emetics, and other medicaments that he concocted, treating a variety of illnesses and wounds, promoting his own miraculous cures, participating in small academic societies and groups of experimenters, and eventually writing books to garner fame and advertise his spectacular successes. Eamon's method is to follow Fioravanti's travels and to contextualize the particular locales and cultural situations in which he operated. As a result, the book provides a vivid introduction to the culture of Renaissance Italy, focused particularly on empirics and other nontraditional medical practitioners, and "professors of secrets."

Fioravanti favored "natural ways of healing" and opposed Galenic medicine based on the balance of the four humors that was the mainstay of university medicine. In describing the views of Fioravanti and others, for example in the 1540s in Bologna, and then in other cities that Fioravanti visited—Palermo, Naples, Rome, Venice, and Madrid—Eamon provides a richly nuanced view of a medical culture that ranged from university-trained physicians to a multiplicity of empirics, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, and "charlatans" who sold their concoctions from makeshift platforms in the piazze of Italian cities. He graphically describes diseases, such as bubonic plague and syphilis, as they must have been experienced by the people who suffered from them in the sixteenth century; and he describes patient reactions to Fioravanti's medicines, such as violent vomiting of putrid material and worms.

The Professor of Secrets contains lively descriptions of empirical and experimental academies, especially in Naples, including a small group surrounding Fioravanti. Eamon underscores the wide dispersion and importance of empirical cultures at this time. He portrays the excitement of the experimenters and underscores their view that their work would benefit humanity as a whole. Alchemy was very much part of this culture, but in this particular context was utilized more for distilling medicines and other practical remedies than for discovering the nature of material reality or ascending to higher philosophical realms.

Fioravanti moved to Venice because it was a great center of printing. He became a highly successful surgeon and empirical healer as he also began to write and publish his many books. Eamon describes the city itself, its role as an emporium with over fifty apothecary shops and numerous printers and print shops. He describes Fioravanti's own activity in making, advertising, and selling a variety of medicines, even developing a mail-order business and writing tracts and books. Fioravanti expounded a theory of disease that derived from corruption centered in the stomach, which could be expelled with a variety of purging medicines. He also branched out into various nonmedical schemes, persuading the Venetians to allow him to rejuvenate the city of Pola (now Pula) on the Dalmatian coast (a failure). In another effort, he wrote numerous letters to Cosimo di Medici with ideas for various inventions involving ships and various types of military apparatus, none of which persuaded Cosimo to give him a position in the Florentine court.

Not unsurprisingly, given his vociferously open criticism of academic medicine, Fioravanti antagonized traditional physicians who eventually managed to get him expelled from Venice for practicing without a license. He immediately went to Bologna, amazingly requested and received a doctorate in arts and medicine from the university there, and then returned triumphantly to Venice to continue his practices legally. Nevertheless, after some time he is found in prison in Milan (following the complaints of Milanese physicians), is released, moves to the court of Philip II in Madrid, again comes to loggerheads with...