History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning

4. Milan: Problems of Exemplarity in Medicine and History

Chapter Four MILAN: PROBLEMS OF EXEMPLARITY IN MEDICINE AND HISTORY ith characteristic acerbity, Girolamo Cardano of Milan expressed his sharp awareness of the problematic nature of exemplary history—the truism, from antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond, that history, magistra vitae, teaches imitation of the good and avoidance of the bad. I might often think it would be far better for histories not to be written and that reading them brings out more evil than good in people. For how does it contribute to good behavior if you read about the frivolity of the Athenians, the treachery of the Carthaginians, the cruelty of tyrants? What is good about the life and deeds of Agathocles or of Phalaris or of Dionysius [of Syracuse]? But neither do the deeds of Marius, Sulla, or Caesar contain any useful example—nothing but deceit, rapine, conspiracy, broken promises, savagery . . . and an in‹nity of things with an unhappy outcome, so that you get neither pleasure nor utility from this kind of reading. Therefore the histories of Tacitus and Meton and Diodorus Siculus and Appian and Thucydides and Machiavelli are against philosophy and sacred studies.1 Both history and medicine offered the record and example of past experience, and both taught Cardano that interpretation of example can be at best an 141 W ambiguous endeavor. He worked out his ideas on the interpretation of the past and the uses of example explicitly in treatises on civil history and moral philosophy, as well as implicitly (though sometimes also explicitly) in copious medical writings. Many other physicians wrote on historical subjects. But Cardano seems to have been among those sixteenth-century ‹gures who selfconsciously pondered issues of historical method. His ideas on the subject and the context in which they developed thus appropriately open the part of this book that addresses the involvement of medical ‹gures in civil history and antiquarian studies and that considers medical contributions to these branches of knowledge in the context of speci‹c regional and cultural settings . In Cardano’s case, his medical and historical ideas took shape not only in the general context of humanistic culture and his own wide historical reading but also in the particular civic environment created by the recent history, current political situation, and social and intellectual milieu of Milan. Cardano was an original thinker on many topics, problems of historical method among them. But because his intellectual formation depended in large part on elements diffused in the learned culture of his time and place, he is no doubt less of a limiting case for Renaissance individualism and innovation than is sometimes assumed. Physicians took ideas about the uses of history and historical example from the same general stock of concepts and sources as their contemporaries in other disciplines. Like those peers, they read ancient historians, humanist discussions of history, and encyclopedic works incorporating historical information. Also like their contemporaries, but with the added advantage of professional expertise, they drew on medical, astrological, and natural philosophical theory to reinforce their understanding of the role of astral, climatic, and biological factors in history. In these fundamental respects, Cardano was certainly not unusual, though he was probably much more widely read than most university-educated physicians. But his views on historical method appear to be the result of his own re›ection on medical and astrological experience, on extensive historical reading, and perhaps on the historical calamities that af›icted his native Milan in his lifetime. Accordingly, this chapter’s exploration of his views on example and interpretation in medicine and history does not imply a claim that those views are representative or typical of sixteenth-century physicians in general. Rather, Cardano’s views invite investigation because of his high level of awareness—and sometimes critical assessment—of the most advanced historical thought of his day. But like all of Cardano’s writings, his remarks on history and historical method are not without ambiguities and contradictions. 142
History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning In medical, philosophical, astrological, and encyclopedic writings, Cardano made copious use of examples from his own medical practice, from ancient and modern history (he cast retroactive horoscopes of such historical ‹gures as Julius II, Luther, Erasmus, and, notoriously, Christ), and from the events of his own life, repeatedly adopting a format in which a collection of examples backed up his theoretical account.2 Yet perhaps in part as a result of considering these...