Patho-Physiognomy: The Body of the Artisan as a Site of Disease and Social Identity

In 1700 the Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini published the first treatise on the Diseases of Artisans. Originally published in Latin, the text was soon translated into several languages and annotated, updated and republished several times in the course of three centuries. Ramazzini, referred in his time as the third Hippocrates, rose to fame again in the twentieth century as the “father of occupational medicine,” with medical institutions and journals named after him. This paper will shift the focus away from Ramazzini to discuss instead the success of the Diseases of Artisans in the context of the early modern interest in artisans’ bodies as repositories of practical knowledge and material intelligence. I will argue that Diseases of Artisans was not just a medical text but also a sort of costume book that merged pathology and physiognomy. While contemporary works on artisans represented the arts through tools, materials and artefacts, Diseases of Artisans characterized each craft by the kind of body that its practitioners acquired because of their exposure to specific substances or repetitive actions.