Affiliation:
1. University of London, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology Birkbeck, London, UK + University of Cambridge, Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK
2. Institute for Balkan Studies Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract
This article, which examines contemporaries? personal experience of illness
in Renaissance Italy, is part of a growing literature which concentrates on
the patient rather than the practitioner. The basis of this study is the
correspondence of Pietro Bembo, the well-known humanist, papal secretary and
latterly Cardinal, with his cousin Gian Matteo Bembo and his long-standing
secretary and friend, Cola Bruno. These letters are revealing of how a
non-medical man understood and described illness in the sixteenth century,
and his personal experience associated particularly with ?mal delle reni?,
which he shared with his friends and recommended treatments. It also reveals
his attitude towards medical practitioners, ranging from scepticism to fully
embracing new therapies such as Holy Wood, which was used to treat the new
epidemic disease of the Great Pox. Indeed he shared his enthusiasm for the
efficacy of this drug with his great friend the physician Girolamo
Fracastoro, the author of Syphilis, the poem which he dedicated to Bembo,
and also of the treatise De contagione et contagiosis morbis (1546).
Publisher
National Library of Serbia
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