Medicina nei Secoli: Journal of History of Medicine and Medical Humanities

Giorgio Valla’s Medical Humanism

Berenice Cavarra — 2024-08-30

The figure and work of Giorgio Valla, humanist and physician from Piacenza (1447-1500), represents a significant specimen of the virtuous interaction between philology and natural science in the second half of the 15th century.

Per un Riordino delle Opere di Giorgio Valla nel Coacervo di Scritti Editi, Inediti e Pseudonimi

Maria Teresa Laneri — 2024-08-30

This paper aims to provide a reasoned account of the literary output, published and unpublished, attributable to Giorgio Valla, including both his translations from Greek and his independent work, as well as texts that for convenience he had printed under a pseudonym or that appeared as written or edited by his adopted son Giovan Pietro Cademosto, an otherwise unknown figure who was responsible for serious alterations, if not actual falsifications, in the posthumously published writings of his father. How far we still are from a full knowledge of this humanist’s work is shown by the recent discovery of manuscripts that transmit writings of his whose existence was utterly unknown, such as the treatises on spelling and prosody De recto modo scribendi and De syllabarum dinoscenda quantitate.

A Significant Medical Manuscript Belonging to Valla: the Mutinensis α.U.9.4 (gr. 61).

Thibault Miguet — 2024-08-30

The Mutinensis α.U.9.4 (gr. 61) is a 15th century manuscript containing several classical and Byzantine medical texts and excerpts. It is well-known that it was used by Valla for his Latin translation of Symeon Seth’s Syntagma de alimentorum facultatibus. But the volume itself received insufficient scholarly interest, whether it be from a codicological or a philological point of view, especially as far as the other medical texts are concerned. This contribution aims at examining in detail the entire manuscript and Valla’s reading of it in order to show that the Mutinensis can be replaced in a flourishing context of other manuscripts, scribes and readers and that it thus represents a key moment in medical humanism. In particular, the relationship between the Mutinensis (and its copyist, Emmanuel Zacharides) and volumes copied by Demetrios Damilas, sheds a new light on connections that hadn’t been insisted upon in previous studies.

Giorgio Valla and His Latin Translations of Galen

Stefania Fortuna — 2024-08-30

By means of his Latin translations Giorgio Valla contributed to the rediscovery of ancient Greek medicine in the Renaissance. In particular, he was the first to publish humanist translations of Galen ahead of his contemporaries Niccolò Leoniceno (1428-1524) and Lorenzo Lorenzi (ca. 1460-1502). In 1483 Valla published the translation of De sectis, followed by those of De inaequali intemperie, De optima corporis constitutione, De bono corporis habitu, Praesagium experientia confirmatum, De venae sectione, and De praenotione in 1498. After his death, two other translations by Valla were printed in the fourth complete edition of Galen of 1515-16, namely those of the ps.-Galenic Quaesita in Hippocratis de urinis and De urinae significatione ex Hippocrate. These last two translations came from Valla’s encyclopedia De expetendis et fugiendis rebus, posthumously published by Aldo Manuzio in 1501, which contains translations of Galenic and ps.-Galenic works, or sections of them, including the aforementioned De sectis, Praesagium experientia confirmatum, and De venae sectione. This article presents Valla’s translations of the Galenic corpus and their impact in the complete editions of Galen; moreover, it identifies the Greek sources of the translations, that is manuscripts owned by Valla (Modena, BEU α.P.5.20 = Puntoni 109, α.U.9.4 = Puntoni 61, and Naples, BN III.C.2); finally, it analyses linguistic and stylistic features in Valla’s translations, especially in those attested in two redactions, aiming to shed light on the chronological relations among them.

Giorgio Valla and the Theory of Perception Between Physiology and Natural Philosophy

Berenice Cavarra — 2024-08-30

Giorgio Valla’s cultural activity as a humanist and physician plays a role of fundamental importance in understanding the developments that philosophy and the history of science went through in the second half of the 15th century. His collection of manuscripts and his vast work as a translator of medical treatises are not only a mere material re-appropriation of the philosophical and scientific culture of the Greek world that the Latin West had lost or known only in mediated form, but also the necessary premise for the construction of an organic system of knowledge. This system, inspired by deep Christian convictions, allowed Valla’s selection and organization of sources in the encyclopedic experiment of De expetendis et fugiendis rebus opus (Venice, 1501). Traces of this process of synthesis and rewriting can also be found in the section of Valla’s encyclopedia dedicated to the relationship between internal and external senses, specifically between imagination (namely, Valla’s translation of the technical term φαντασία/φανταστικόν) and sense-organs.

Giorgio Valla’s Dioscorides (Mutin. A.P.5.17, GR. 115)

Marie Cronier — 2024-08-30

Giorgio Valla owned a Greek manuscript of Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, a reference work in the field of pharmacology for simple medicines. Today kept at the Biblioteca Estense Universitaria in Modena with the shelf mark α.P.5.17, it is partly autograph and bears a subscription dated 1487. Representative of the earliest studies on the Greek text of Discorides’ in Humanist Italy, this manuscript is of particular interest in many respects, not least because of the conditions under which it was produced and the achievements it led to. This article will therefore consider both the production and usage contexts of the manuscript, which place Giorgio Valla at the centre of a network of humanists interested in compiling and interpreting Dioscorides’ text (Ermolao Barbaro, Angelo Poliziano, Nicolò Leoniceno and Alessandro Bondino), as well as the concrete evidence of how Valla could read and use the treatise.

Giorgio Valla as a Translator of Aristotle. Philological Remarks on his Latin Translations of Poetics, Magna Moralia, and De Caelo

Ciro Giacomelli — 2024-08-30

In 1498, Giorgio Valla published a collection of translations from Greek into Latin. The selection of texts included in this edition is unprecedented, and it reflects Valla’s interests in ancient medicine, science, and philosophy. These new translations were not successful and were almost completely set aside as soon as other translations became available. In this paper, I will offer a first assessment of the three Aristotelian translations published by Valla and included in the 1498 incunable. Out of the three texts translated by Valla, only the Magna Moralia were not already available in a renaissance translation. This explains why only this translation enjoyed a rather wide success, being reprinted several times in the 16th century, while the other two suffered the competition of rival renderings. Valla is the author of the first printed translation of the Poetics. This translation was initially well received and was reprinted twice; it was later abandoned in favour of Alexander Pacius’ version, published in 1536. Valla’s third translation of Aristotle was that of the De Caelo. Despite its merits, Valla’s translation of the De Caelo was unsuccessful: John Argyropulus’ rendering had appeared in print only a few years earlier, and it became the standard reference in the following centuries. This article extends the analysis of Valla’s translations to the Greek sources used by the humanist.

Antoine Gros’s Bonaparte Visitant les Pestiférés de Jaffa: Propaganda or a Medical Illustration?

Ernesto Damiani — 2024-08-30

In September 1804 the French painter Antoine-Jean Gros first exhibited the painting Bonaparte visitant les pestiférés de Jaffa, illustrating Bonaparte touching the bubo of a plague-stricken soldier in Jaffa hospital during the Egyptian campaign. Today, this work is interpreted as blatant propaganda. However, the use of primary sources to reconstruct how people experienced illness in the past is essential. In this work, for the first time we propose a primarily medical interpretation of Gros's painting. According to medicine prior to the "germ theory", fear was considered a moral affection negatively influencing both the contagion and the outcome of plague. Therefore, holding back the fear was the best way to prevent the plague. French medical officers acted accordingly, providing encouraging examples to the soldiers. Especially, the medical officer Desgenettes voluntarily exposed himself to the risk of contagion, inoculating himself with a contaminated lancet. Napoleon's act of touching the bubo depicted by Gros in the painting provided soldiers with another encouraging demonstration of genuine therapeutic value, considering the medicine of the time. It seems, therefore, plausible to conclude that Gros faithfully represented a situation imbued with medical meaning, fully understandable by the public.

The Scientific Journalism According to Elisabetta Caminer: Objectivity, Exactness of Information and Universality

Michaela Liuccio — 2024-08-30

Elisabetta Caminer offers the first example in Italy of an editor of literary journals. She wrote in order to divulgate subjects that were not normally accessible to everyone, yet also to combat the prejudices. The attention placed on the exact source of all the news and excerpts reported represented a rather unique case in the history of Italian journalism of the time. In her texts emerge the objectivity of information, the responsibility for expressive choices, sometimes even subversive - as in the choice of the code - and the awareness of change in scientific communication. Science, morality, politics, academies, inventions, education, all these themes found in the pages of the her magazine a scientific, rational, rigorous treatment, which left little room for subjective judgment, yet a great deal for the objectivity of the text. As well as, in her articles we found a commitment to the battle for women’s rights to scientific education.

Assisted Suicide and Malingering in Xenophon of Ephesus’ Anthia and Habrocomes: Literary Sources, Medical Ethics and Parascientifics Aspects (Xen. Eph. 3,4-5; 5,7)

Christina Savino — 2024-08-30

In Xenophon of Ephesus’ Anthia and Habrocomes (1^st – 2^nd centuries AD) two episodes address medical topics that are most controversial nowadays: assisted suicide and malingering. This article provides an analysis of both episodes aiming to reconstruct the ancient Greek views on these subjects and better understand their cultural past.