Natural Asymmetries: Medicine and Poetry in Decameron VI. 9 and Decameron VIII. 9

Epistemological Crisis, Natural Philosophy and Boccaccio's Critique of Medical Science

At the blurred edge between the waning of the Middle Ages and the dawn of modernity, the Decameron illustrates that moral decadence and epistemological crisis were two connected factors in the decline of contemporary mercantile society.¹ These factors represented different aspects of the failure of the founding institutions of civic life (laws, moral and religious codes, scientific principles etc.) strained by a lengthy period of wars, economic and financial crises, climatic catastrophes, famine and waves of epidemics. This crisis had produced a new ideological context in which the relation between appearance and reality started to be perceived as ambiguous. The ideal continuity [End Page S-56] of macro- and microcosms at the basis of scientific thought started to be questioned. In the Decameron, physicians are significant figures illustrating the connection between moral and epistemological crises, and their analyses casts light on Boccaccio's critique of contemporary ideas on natural philosophy and the place poetry should hold among the disciplines that formed its articulated system, ranging from physics to medicine and astrology.

Boccaccio's description of the plague in the introduction to the first day, as both a realistic and symbolic construction, denounces that in mid-fourteenth-century Florentine society the "segno della ragione" had already been trespassed in moral as well as in scientific terms.² In particular, in denouncing the limits of medical science in curing the plague and detecting its causes, Boccaccio also reveals the frailty of its epistemological foundations.³ At the core of this sense of failure of medical science triggered by the plague, there was the disoriented belief that a rational investigation of what lies beyond experience was possible. If macro- and microcosmos were still seen in a continuum, the belief that the laws regulating them could be understood if accessed with a rigorous method, began to be critically scrutinized.

According to a harmonious vision of nature, observable phenomena and elements derived their properties from the influence of the celestial bodies, which had been created to operate their effects in the sublunary world. Because of this underlying cosmological model, astrology was a key component in the system of knowledge that had been systematized in schools and universities since the eleventh and twelfth centuries, especially after the translation and circulation of both Aristotle's corpus on natural philosophy and its Arab commentaries.⁴ Starting from the thirteenth century, as medicine developed from empirical practice to rational science and was gradually assimilated into the system of the arts, astrology became part of the medical curriculum in major schools such as Bologna and Padua.⁵ Physicians shaping the teaching of medical science in universities also started to claim a special place for medicine in the field of natural philosophy, [End Page S-57] for it represented a theoretical and practical art capable of comprehending the invisible laws of nature at work in the human body in connection with those regulating the macrocosm.⁶

It is worth briefly describing what was at stake in this approach to medical science in order to better understand Boccaccio's real goals in his critical representation of medicine in the Decameron. According to the most ancient traditions, from Hyppocrates (Dec. 8.9.38: "Ipocrasso e Avicena") to Galen, disease was conceived as the result of an imbalance in the composition of the four elements (water, fire, earth and air) and their qualities (hot, cold, dry and humid) that gave origin to four fundamental temperaments (sanguine, choleric, melancholic and phlegmatic) connected to the constellations of the zodiac and subject to their influence. The study of astrology was thus essential to scrutinizing the causes of observed imbalances in the humors and assessing their best cure.⁷ Such a conception of disease depended on the physician's capacity to interpret the movements of the celestial spheres and their influence on the composition of the human body but, at the same time, implicitly introduced a possible deterministic element that would eventually contradict free will when such influence was extended to include all aspects of the human dimension, body and...