Francesco Maria Fiorentini (1603–1673): An Italian physician in ‘The Iron Century’

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the figure of Francesco Maria Fiorentini, a 17th-century physician from Lucca (Tuscany, Italy) and member of the Iatromechanical School, who distinguished himself for his role during the plague and the typhus epidemics that spread throughout Italy in the first half of that century. His work must be contextualized in a precise historical moment, which marked the gradual transition of Western medicine from the archaism of Galenic doctrine to that of the Iatromechanical School, when the foundations started to be laid for an experimental type of medicine that based its assumptions on the direct observation of phenomena concerning the human body. In this work, we mainly focus on the medical biography of Fiorentini and on the reasons why he enjoyed great social prestige among the most prominent figures of his time. However, Fiorentini should also be remembered as a multifaceted scholar, as evidenced by his numerous writings, which underline his erudition in disparate fields of knowledge.