Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (review)

From its very page, David Gentilcore's study asserts, and then demonstrates, that the group noted in the title were not "charlatans" as we normally define them, that is, pretenders to medical knowledge or ability, but a particular type of medical practitioner licensed to work in Italian cities and states beginning in the mid-sixteenth century. Their licenses came from Protomedicato tribunals, the colleges of physicians or offices of public health that also licensed barbers and apothecaries. Records of these licensing procedures are only one of many types of sources that Gentilcore uses to situate charlatans within the panoply of medical practitioners consulted by early modern Italians. Their sales tactics may have been flashy and their promises of complete cures extravagant, but the ingredients in their salves, powders, and potions, and the techniques with which they treated sufferers, were little different from those offered by less flamboyant types of medical practitioners. Charlatans were first licensed at the point when Galenic medical theory and the treatments based on it were being increasingly challenged by what would become "modern" chemical medicine, and the range of treatments suggested for ailments and illnesses was correspondingly broad. Charlatans fit rather comfortably within this array, but when medical opinion coalesced again and medicine was increasingly professionalized in the later eighteenth century, they were marginalized and their numbers dropped, although it would be another two centuries before they disappeared.

The book opens with two chapters that examine representations of charlatans, the first representations in works by others, and the second self-representations. Gentilcore finds a range of views toward charlatans among their contemporaries, expressed in plays, sermons, medical treatises, and other written works. He finds a similar range-though tending toward the negative-in visual works, a number of which are reproduced here. (And on this Oxford University Press is to be commended for producing the book on fine-grained sturdy paper, which makes the small details of paintings, etchings, engravings, manuscript illustrations, and even a picture made entirely of feathers easy to see.) Charlatans' self-presentations emerge in the types of documents that social historians over the last several decades have used so successfully to examine the creation of the self among lower-class people, such as wills, petititions, and trial testimony; a few charlatans also told their own stories more formally in memoirs. Not surprisingly, in all of these texts charlatans defend their profession-and for them, as well as for the licensing boards, it is a profession-as they defend their medicines and treatments.

The second part of the book turns from representation to reality, what Gentilcore in a post-post-modern turn boldly terms "a phenomenon that can be said to have actually existed." (p. 5) He examines the origins of charlatanism in a number of different activities, including street-peddling, popular theatre, and alchemy, and then traces the development of the licensing system regulating this new form of what might be called medical theatre. The licensing system was so widespread in Italy that Gentilcore decided to turn the licenses he found into a database for quantitative analysis. This allows him to be unusually specific about a number of issues: the social and geographical origins of licensed charlatans, the nature of what they were selling, the distances they traveled to peddle their wares, and their relations with university-trained physicians. The database-which will be open to other researchers through a website-includes 1596 different licenses, issued to 1075 different individuals (including 26 women), selling 2648 remedies. Many charlatans sold the same or very similar remedies, and Gentilcore has sorted through the lists of ingredients and therapeutic functions to determine that there were around 382 different concoctions.

Statistics on various topics derived from these numbers, presented through tables, charts, maps, and text, provide actual quantifiable data rather than impressionistic observations on a number of broad issues of concern to early modern historians, including migration, social mobility, marital patterns, the impact of printing, and the openness of authorities to new ideas. The numbers...