Durant W. The Renaissance. A History of Civilization in Italy from 1304-1576 A.D
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the sickness of a patient, that he would supervise the preparation
of his prescriptions, and that he would take no part of the price
charged by the apothecary for filling them. The same law (Venice,
1368) limited the apothecary's charge for filling a prescription to
ten soldi - `051922 coins now impossible to evaluate. We hear of
several cases in which the medical fee, by a specific contract, was
made conditional on cure. `051923
Surgery was rising rapidly in repute as its repertoire of operations
and instruments approached the variety and competence of ancient
Egyptian practice. Bernardo da Rapallo devised the perineal
operation for stone (1451), and Mariano Santo became famous for his
many successful lithotomies by lateral incision (c. 1530). Giovanni da
Vigo, surgeon to Julius II, developed better methods of ligature for
arteries and veins. Plastic surgery, known to the ancients, reappeared
in Sicily about 1450: mutilated noses, lips, and ears were repaired by
grafts of skin from other parts of the body, and so well that the
lines of adhesion could scarcely be detected. `051924
Public sanitation was improving. As Doge of Venice (1343-54), Andrea
Dandolo established the first known municipal commission of public
health; `051925 other Italian cities followed the example. These
magistrati della sanita tested all foods and drugs offered for
public sale, and isolated the victims of some contagious diseases.
As a result of the Black Death, Venice in 1374 excluded from her
port all ships carrying persons or goods suspected of infection. At
Ragusa (1377) such arrivals were detained for thirty days in special
quarters before being admitted into the city. Marseille (1383)
lengthened the detention period to forty days- la quarantine, and
Venice followed suit in 1403. `051926
Hospitals were multiplying under the zeal of both laity and
clergy. Siena built in 1305 a hospital famous for its size and
services, and Francesco Sforza founded the Ospedale Maggiore in
Milan (1456). In 1423 Venice converted the island of Santa Maria di
Nazaret into a lazaretto to hospitalize infected persons; this is
the first institution of its kind known in Europe. `051927 Florence in
the fifteenth century had thirty-five hospitals. `051928 These
establishments were generously supported by public and private
donations. Some hospitals were notable examples of architecture,
like the Ospedale Maggiore; some adorned their halls with inspiring
works of art. The Ospedale del Ceppo at Pistoia engaged Giovanni della
Robbia to mold for its walls terra-cotta reliefs vividly describing
typical hospital scenes; and the facade of the Ospedale degli
Innocenti at Florence, designed by Brunellesco, was signalized by
the charming terra-cotta medallions placed in the spandrels of its
portico arches by Andrea della Robbia. Luther, who was so shocked by
the immorality that he found in Italy in 1511, was also impressed by
its charitable and medical institutions. He described the hospitals in
his Table Talk:
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In Italy the hospitals are handsomely built, and admirably
provided with excellent food and drink, careful attendants, and
learned physicians. The beds and bedding are clean, and the walls
are covered with paintings. When a patient is brought in, his
clothes are removed in the presence of a notary who makes a faithful
inventory of them, and they are kept safely. A white smock is put on
him, and he is laid on a comfortable bed, with clean linen.
Presently two doctors come to him, and servants bring him food and
drink in clean vessels.... Many ladies take turns to visit the
hospitals and tend the sick, keeping their faces veiled, so that no
one knows who they are; each remains a few days and then returns home,
another taking her place.... Equally excellent are the foundling
asylums of Florence, where the children are well fed and taught,
suitably clothed in a uniform, and altogether admirably cared
for. `051929
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It is often the fatality of medicine that its heroic advances in
therapy are balanced- almost pursued- by new diseases. Smallpox and
measles, hardly known in Europe before the sixteenth century, now came
to the fore; Europe experienced its first recorded influenza
epidemic in 1510; and epidemics of typhus- a disease not mentioned
before 1477- swept Italy in 1505 and 1528. But it was the sudden
appearance and rapid dissemination of syphilis in Italy and France
toward the end of the fifteenth century that constituted the most
startling phenomenon and test of Renaissance medicine. Whether
syphilis existed in Europe before 1493, or was brought from America by
the return of Columbus in that year, is a matter still debated by
the well informed, and not to be settled here.
Certain facts support the theory of an indigenous European
origin. On July 25, 1463, a prostitute testified in a court at Dijon
that she had dissuaded an unwelcome suitor by telling him that she had
le gros mal - not further described in the record. `051930 On March
25, 1494, the town crier of Paris was directed to order from the
city all persons afflicted with la grosse verole. `051931 We do
not know what this "great pox" was; it may have been syphilis. Late in
1494 a French army invaded Italy; on February 21, 1495, it Occupied
Naples; soon afterward a malady became rampant there, which the
Italians called il morbo gallico, "the French disease," alleging
that the French had brought it into Italy. Many of the French soldiers
were infected with it; when they returned to France, in October, 1495,
they scattered the disease among the people; in France, therefore,
it was called le mal de Naples, on the assumption that the French
army had contracted it there. On August 7, 1495, two months before the
return of the French army from Italy, the Emperor Maximilian issued an
edict in which mention was made of malum francicum; obviously this
"French disease" could not be ascribed to the French army not yet
returned from Italy. From 1500 on, the term morbus gallicus was used
throughout Europe to mean syphilis. `051932 We may conclude that there
are suggestions, but no convincing evidence, that syphilis existed
in Europe before 1493.
The case for an American origin is based upon a report written
between 1504 and 1506 (but not published till 1539) by a Spanish
physician, Ruy Diaz de l'Isla. He relates that on the return voyage of
Columbus the pilot of the admiral's vessel was attacked by a severe
fever, accompanied with frightful skin eruptions, and adds that he
himself, at Barcelona, had treated sailors infected with this new
disease, which, he says, had never been known there before. He
identified it with what Europe was calling morbus gallicus, and
contended that the infection had been brought from America. `051933
Columbus, on his first return from the West Indies, reached Palos,
Spain, on March 15, 1493. In that same month Pintor, physician to
Alexander VI, noted the first appearance of the morbus gallicus in
Rome. `051934 Almost two years elapsed between the return of
Columbus and the French occupation of Naples- sufficient time for
the disease to spread from Spain to Italy; on the other hand, it is
not certain that the plague that ravaged Naples in 1495 was
syphilis. `051935 Very few bones whose lesions may be interpreted as
syphilitic have been found in pre-Columbian European remains; many
such bones have been found among the relics of pre-Columbian
America. *05051 `051936
In any case the new disease spread with terrifying speed. Caesar
Borgia apparently contracted it in France. Many cardinals, and
Julius II himself, were infected; but we must allow the possibility,
in such instances, of infection by innocent contact with persons or
objects bearing the active germ. Skin pustules had long since been
treated in Europe with mercurial ointment; now mercury became as
popular as penicillin is in our day; surgeons and quacks were called
alchemists because they turned mercury into gold. Prophylactic
measures were taken. A law of 1496 in Rome forbade barbers to admit
syphilitics, or to use instruments that had been employed by or on
them. More frequent examination of prostitutes was established, and
some cities tried to evade the problem by expelling courtesans; so
Ferrara and Bologna banished such women in 1496, on the ground that
they had "a secret kind of pox which others call the leprosy of St.
Job." `051938 The Church preached chastity as the one prophylaxis
needed, and many churchmen practised it.
The name syphilis was first applied to the disease by Girolamo
Fracastoro, one of the most varied and yet best integrated
characters of the Renaissance. He had a good start: he was born at
Verona (1483) of a patrician family that had already produced
outstanding physicians. At Padua he studied almost everything. He
had Copernicus as a fellow student, and Pomponazzi and Achillini to
teach him philosophy and anatomy; at twenty-four he was himself
professor of logic. Soon he retired to devote himself to scientific,
above all medical, research, tempered with a fond study of classic
literature. This association of science and letters produced a rounded
personality, and a remarkable poem, written in Latin on the model of
Virgil's Georgics, and entitled Syphilis, sive de morbo gallico
(1521). Italians since Lucretius have excelled in writing poetical
didactic poetry, but who would have supposed that the undulant
spirochete would lend itself to fluent verse? Syphilus, in ancient
mythology, was a shepherd who decided to worship not the gods, whom he
could not see, but the king, the only visible lord of his flock;
whereupon angry Apollo infected the air with noxious vapors, from
which Syphilus contracted a disease fouled with ulcerous eruptions
over his body; this is essentially the story of Job. Fracastoro
proposed to trace the first appearance, epidemic spread, causes, and
therapy of "a fierce and rare sickness, never before seen for
centuries past, which ravished all of Europe and the flourishing
cities of Asia and Libya, and invaded Italy in that unfortunate war
whence from the Gauls it has its name." He doubted that the ailment
had come from America, for it appeared almost simultaneously in many
European countries far apart. The infection
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did not manifest itself at once, but remained latent for a certain
time, sometimes for a month... even for four months. In the majority
of cases small ulcers began to appear on the sexual organs.... Next,
the skin broke out with encrusted pustules.... Then these ulcerated
pustules ate away the skin, and... infected even the bones.... In some
cases the lips or nose or eyes were eaten away, or, in others, the
whole of the sexual organs. `051939
-
The poem goes on to discuss treatment by mercury or by guaiac- a
"holy wood" used by the American Indians. In a later work, De
contagione, Fracastoro dealt in prose with various contagious
diseases- syphilis, typhus, tuberculosis- and the modes of contagion
by which they could be spread. In 1545 he was called by Paul III to be
head physician for the Council of Trent. Verona raised a noble
monument to his memory, and Giovanni dal Cavino graved his likeness on
a medallion which is one of the finest works of its kind.
Before 1500 it was usual to class all contagious diseases together
under the indiscriminate name of "the plague." It was one measure of
the progress of medicine that it now clearly distinguished and
diagnosed the specific character of an epidemic, and was prepared to
deal with so sudden and virulent an eruption as syphilis. Mere
reliance on Hippocrates and Galen could never have sufficed in such
a crisis; it was because the medical profession had learned the
necessity of ever fresh and detailed study of symptoms, causes, and
cures, in an ever widening and intercommunicated experience, that it
could meet this unexpected test.
And it was because of such high qualifications, devotion, and
practical success, that the better class of physicians was now
recognized as belonging to the untitled aristocracy of Italy. Having
completely secularized their profession, they made it more respected
than the clergy. Several of them were not only the medical but as well
the political advisers, and the frequent and favored companions, of
princes, prelates, and kings. Many of them were humanists, familiar
with classical literature, collecting manuscripts and works of art;
often they were the close friends of great artists. Finally, many of
them realized the Hippocratic ideal of adding philosophy to
medicine; they passed with ease from one subject to another in their
studies and their teaching; and they gave the professional
philosophical fraternity a stimulus to subject Plato, Aristotle, and
Aquinas- as they subjected Hippocrates, Galen, and Avicenna- to a
fresh and fearless examination of reality.
IV. PHILOSOPHY
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At first glance the Italian Renaissance does not seem to offer a
reasonable harvest of philosophy. Its product cannot compare with
the heyday of French Scholasticism from Abelard to Aquinas, not to
speak of "the school of Athens." Its most famous name in philosophy
(if we extend the time limit of the Renaissance) is Giordano Bruno
(1548?-1600), whose work lies beyond the period of our study in this
volume. Pomponazzi remains; but who now does reverence to his poor
heroic skeptical squeak?
The humanists incubated a philosophical revolution by discovering,
and cautiously revealing, the world of Greek philosophy; but, for
the most part, and excepting Valla, they were too clever to lay
their beliefs on the table. The university professors of philosophy
were hobbled by the Scholastic tradition: after spending seven or
eight years struggling through that wilderness, they either
abandoned it for other fields of study, or drove another generation
into it, glorifying the hurdles that had broken their wills and
brought their intellects to a safe dead end. And who knows but many of
them felt a certain mental and economic security in confining
themselves to recondite problems carefully and fruitlessly phrased
in unintelligible terminology? In most philosophical faculties
Scholasticism was still de rigueur, and already stiffening with
the approach of death. The old medieval questions were laboriously
reviewed in the old medieval forms of disputation, and in the proud
publications of the staff.
Two elements of life entered to revive philosophy: the conflict
between Platonists and Aristotelians, and the division of
Aristotelians into orthodox and Averroists. At Bologna and Padua these
conflicts became veritable duels, literally matters of life and death.
The humanists were mostly Platonists; under the influence of
Gemistus Pletho, Bessarion, Theodorus Gaza, and other Greeks, they
drank deeply of the wine of the Dialogues, and could hardly
understand how anyone could bear the arid logic, impotent Organon,
and leaden golden mean of the cautious Aristotle. But these Platonists
were resolved to remain Christians; and it was, so to speak, as
their representative and delegate that Marsilio Ficino devoted half
his life to reconciling the two systems of thought. For this purpose
he studied widely, going so far afield as to Zoroaster and
Confucius. When he reached Plotinus, and himself translated the
Enneads, he felt that he had found in mystic Neoplatonism the silken
cord that would bind Plato to Christ. He tried to formulate this
synthesis in his Theologia platonica, a confused medley of
orthodoxy, occultism, and Hellenism, and arrived hesitantly at a
pantheistic conclusion: God is the soul of the world. This became
the philosophy of Lorenzo and his circle, of the Platonic Academies in
Rome, Naples, and elsewhere; from Naples it reached Giordano Bruno;
from Bruno it passed to Spinoza and thence to Hegel; it is still
alive.
But there was something to be said for Aristotle, especially if he
could be misinterpreted. Was Aquinas right in understanding him to
teach personal immortality, or was Averroes right in reading De
anima as affirming the deathlessness of only the collective soul of
mankind? The terrible Averroes, that ogre of an Arab, whom Italian art
had long since pictured as prostrate under the feet of St. Thomas, was
so active a competitor for the domination of the Aristotelians that
both Bologna and Padua were hot with his heresy. It was at Padua
that the Marsilius who took its name had lost his reverence for the
Church; *05052 at Padua that Filippo Algeri da Nola, the precursor
of Nola- born Bruno, had imbibed those frightful errors for which he
was sorrowfully cast into a barrel of boiling pitch. `051940 Nicoletto
Vernias, as professor of philosophy at Padua (1471-99), appears to
have taught there the doctrine that only the world-soul, not the
individual soul, is immortal; `051941 and his pupil Agostino Nifo
propounded the same notion in a treatise De intellectu et daemonibus
(1492). Usually the skeptics sought to sooth the Inquisition by
distinguishing (as Averroes had done) between two kinds of truth-
religious and philosophical: a proposition, they urged, might be
rejected in philosophy from the standpoint of reason, while still
accepted on faith in the word of Scripture or the Church. Nifo
professed the principle with reckless simplification: Loquendum est
ut plures, sentiendum ut pauci - "We must speak as the many do, we
must think as the few." `051942 Nifo changed his mind or his speech as
his hair changed, and reconciled himself to orthodoxy. As professor of
philosophy at Bologna he drew lords, ladies, and multitudes to
lectures dramatized with grimaces and antics and salted with anecdotes
and wit. He became socially the most successful opponent of
Pomponazzi.
Pietro Pomponazzi, the microscopic bombshell of Renaissance
philosophy, was so diminutive that his familiars called him Peretto-
"little Peter." But he had a large head, a vast brow, a hooked nose,
small, black, penetrating eyes: here was a man doomed to take life and
thought with painful seriousness. Born at Mantua (1462) of patrician
stock, he studied philosophy and medicine at Padua, took both
degrees at twenty-five, and was soon himself a professor there. All
the skeptical tradition of Padua descended to him and culminated in
him; as his admirer Vanini was to put it, "Pythagoras would have
judged that the soul of Averroes had transmigrated into the body of
Pomponazzi." `051943 Wisdom seems always a reincarnation or echo,
since it remains the same through a thousand varieties and generations
of error.
Pomponazzi continued to teach at Padua from 1495 to 1509; then the
winds of war swept through the city, and closed its historic
University halls. In 1512 we find him established at the University of
Bologna. There he remained to the end of his days, marrying thrice,
always lecturing on Aristotle, and modestly likening his relation to
his master to that of an insect exploring an elephant. `051944 He
thought it safer to offer his ideas not as his own but as implied or
explicit in Aristotle interpreted by Alexander of Aphrodisias. His
procedure seems at times too humble, apparently subservient to a
dead authority; but since the Church, following Aquinas, claimed her
doctrine to be that of Aristotle, Pomponazzi may have felt that any
demonstration of a heresy as truly Aristotelian would be one way,
short of the stake, of teasing the orthodox tail. The Fifth Council of
the Lateran, under the presidency of Leo X (1513), condemned all who
should assert that the soul is one and indivisible in all men, and
that the individual soul is mortal. Three years later Pomponazzi
published his major work, De immortalitate animae, in which he
sought to show that the condemned view was precisely that of
Aristotle. Mind, said Pietro's Aristotle, is at every step dependent
upon matter; the most abstract knowledge is ultimately derived from
sensation; only through the body can mind act upon the World;
consequently a disembodied soul, surviving the mortal frame, would
be a functionless and helpless wraith. As Christians and faithful sons
of the Church, Pomponazzi concluded, we are warranted in believing
in the immortality of the individual soul; as philosophers we are not.
It seems never to have occurred to Pomponazzi that his argument had no
validity against Catholicism, which taught the resurrection of the
body as well as of the soul. Perhaps he did not take this doctrine
seriously, and had no thought that his readers would. No one, so far
as we know, urged it against him.
The book ran into a storm. The Fransciscan friars persuaded the doge
of Venice to order all procurable copies to be publicly burned,
which was done. Protests were made to the papal court, but Bembo and
Bibbiena were then high in Leo's councils, and advised him that the
conclusions of the book were perfectly orthodox; the conclusions were.
Leo was not fooled; he knew quite well this little trick of the two
truths; but he contented himself with ordering Pomponazzi to write a
decent word of submission. `051945 Pietro complied in Apologiae libri
tres (1518), reasserting that as a Christian he accepted all the
teaching of the Church. About the same time Leo commissioned
Agostino Nifo to compose an answer to Pomponazzi's book; as Agostino
loved controversy, he executed this assignment with pleasure and
skill. It is remarkable, and perhaps illustrates a continuing
antipathy between the universities and the clergy, that while
Pomponazzi's head hung, so to speak, in this Inquisitorial balance,
three universities competed for his services. Hearing that Pisa was
seeking to lure him to her halls, the magistrates of Bologna, formally
subject to the pope but deaf to the Franciscan furor, confirmed
Pomponazzi's professorial tenure for eight years further, and raised
his annual salary to 1600 ducats ($20,000?). `051946
In two minor books, which he did not publish in his lifetime,
Pomponazzi continued his skeptical campaign. In De incantatione he
reduced to natural causes many supposedly supernatural phenomena. A
physician had written to him about cures allegedly due to incantations
or charms; Pietro bade him doubt. "It would be ridiculous and absurd,"
he wrote, "to despise what is visible and natural in order to have
recourse to an invisible cause the reality of which is not
guaranteed to us by any solid probability." `051947 As a Christian
he accepts angels and spirits; as a philosopher he rejects them; all
causes under God are natural. Reflecting his medical training, he
laughs at the widespread belief in occult sources of cure: if
spirits could cure the ills of the flesh they would have to be
material, or use material means, to affect a material body; and he
ironically pictures the healing spirits as rushing about with their
paraphernalia of plasters, ointments, and pills. `051948 However he
admits certain curative powers in some plants and stones. He will
accept the miracles of the Bible, but suspects that they were
natural operations. The universe is governed by uniform and invariable
laws. Miracles are unusual manifestations of natural forces whose
powers and methods are only partly known to us; and what the people
cannot understand they ascribe to spirits or to God. `051949 Without
contradicting this view of natural causation, Pomponazzi accepts
much of astrology. Not only are the lives of men subject to the action
of the heavenly bodies, but all human institutions, he thinks, even
including religions, rise and flourish and decay according to