Constructing a Maverick Physician in Print: Leonardo Fioravanti, the Medical Examination of Odors, and the Reconstructed Nose

In his medical treatise De urinis, the learned physician Giovanni Battista da Monte (1498–1551), perhaps best known for integrating clinical practice into his teaching, insisted that urine needed to be analyzed not only in terms of color and consistency but also odor.¹ He devoted an entire chapter, titled De odore, to the crucial topic of the role of smells and smelling in diagnostic practice, and he offered in this medical book, printed posthumously in 1554, the following straightforward information: “Therefore, either urine will be odorous or deprived of odor,” meaning it could smell either “good” (it has no real odor) or “bad” (it has a putrescent odor, which is to say, prosaically, it stinks).² Da Monte made similar claims regarding the analysis of excrement, which we should understand to denote not only feces and urine but also anything excreted from the body, including tears. It was deemed necessary to detect, among other symptoms, the odor of that “certain redundant matter in the body” (da Monte, 6r; 4r–5v). But da Monte’s rhetorically unembellished observations, which rehearse the position of the great classical medical man Galen, raise a troubling question. What doctors in their right minds would ever want to stick their noses in the putrid places of a patient, or the putrid excretions of a patient? The Paduan physician Gabriele Zerbi (1445–1505) seems to have had this question in mind when he refused to smell the breath of a patient: “that he admitted as much in a book on the physician and his conduct, published in 1495,” the medical historian Richard Palmer observes, “suggests that Zerbi did not expect reproach.”³ In theory, a physician was supposed to diagnose the cause of a disease through smell, which in all likelihood meant that he had to get his trained nose fairly close to the “redundant matter in the body,” but perhaps in practice this was not always a desirable thing to do. Two centuries before da Monte wrote about excrement, the laureate poet Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), who often warred with the medical profession in his humanist diatribes and letters, took pleasure in ridiculing what he perceived to be the inherently filthy habits of physicians. They turned pale, as he cruelly put it in his Invective contra medicum, from inhaling so much excremental odor of feces and urine (155 (II.741–49)).⁴ For Petrarca, physicians not only exercised a profession unworthy of being considered so elevated by the cultural elite, but they engaged in activities that were decidedly in bad taste.

At least one man of medicine—a near contemporary of da Monte—avidly analyzed every aspect of urine so as to become exceedingly knowledgeable about it, or at least he confessed to having done so with self-aggrandizing pride and with a curious disregard for professional matters associated (to borrow terms dear to the late Eduardo Saccone) with “buone” and “cattive maniere.” The unconventional Renaissance Italian physician, surgeon, and writer Leonardo Fioravanti (1517–88), who was sometimes taken as a charlatan and a quack in his own time, informs us in his De’ capricci medicinali (1561), a medical compendium published six years after da Monte’s De urinis, how he was tricked in his professional development as a doctor because he was handed some “Trebbiano wine” instead of urine to analyze.⁵ Because of its yellowish color (“zalletto”), the Bolognese Fioravanti takes the “urine,” which he examines on the basis of its color alone, to signify that the person suffers from excess “choleric humor.”⁶ Because of his professional mistake, which is narrated in the form of a cautionary tale, Fioravanti urges doctors who actually practice medicine, rather than those who just theorize about it and are full of book knowledge, to learn how to distinguish real urine from other substances that might be fobbed off on an unsuspecting doctor as a ruse. Fioravanti himself, as he tells his story about his medical blunder, explains how he went about systematically acquiring that knowledge: he engaged members of his...