Surgeons and the Medicalization of Urban Italy: Print and Manuscript Evidence

Surgeons were key agents in the medicalization of early modern Italy, where a sophisticated medical economy combined medicinal consumerism with a widespread culture of hygiene. From the modest bloodletter up to the university-trained surgeon, they provided all kinds of health and beauty treatment for the urban society, including its lower strata. Excellent studies have delved into the Italian tradition of Renaissance learned surgery. In contrast, with few exceptions (notably S. Cavallo), the culture, work and intellectual output of the common practitioners remain largely unexplored. Although they are unanimously viewed as go-betweens, relatively little attention has been devoted to the role played by surgeons in sustaining medicalization across different social groups, as well as in promoting change in the physiological and pathological ideas that underpinned it. This paper aims at bridging this historiographical gap. By analysing printed surgical books in the period 1650-1800 both as texts and objects, it tackles the circulation of surgical knowledge in multiple audiences and the social diversification of health care, while shedding light on surgeons’ strategies of self-fashioning according to their background and professional profile. Manuscripts, however, reveal other aspects and trajectories of this process. Indeed, in this same period, manuscript surgical texts – transcripts of lectures, compendia, surgery casebooks- continued to be produced and circulated. I will argue that they offer new insight into the evolution of surgical culture, as well as into the ways it was transmitted and appropriated by different milieus.