Girolamo Mercuriale Johann Crato von Krafftheim: Une Correspondance Entre Deux Medecins Humanistes ed. by Jean-Michel Agasse and Concetta Pennuto

Abstract

Reviewed by: Girolamo Mercuriale Johann Crato von Krafftheim: Une Correspondance Entre Deux Medecins Humanistes ed. by Jean-Michel Agasse and Concetta Pennuto Andrea Carlino Jean-Michel Agasse and Concetta Pennuto, eds. Girolamo Mercuriale Johann Crato von Krafftheim: Une Correspondance Entre Deux Medecins Humanistes. Cahiers d’Humanisme et Renaissance. Geneva: Librairie DROZ, 2016. 342 pp. $78.00 (978-2-600-01875-3). Girolamo Mercuriale and Johann Crato von Krafftheim briefly met in Vienna in 1573 at the bedside of the Emperor Maximilian II. At that time, Crato was a physician employed at the imperial court; Mercuriale, a brilliant and renowned professor at the University of Padua, was summoned in Vienna to temporarily join the medical team gathered to deal with Maximilian’s poor health condition. This short encounter (Mercuriale’s visit in Vienna lasted no more than three weeks) [End Page 551] was the occasion that generated an intense correspondence between these two prominent figures of late sixteenth-century medicine. Crato, after an education in Wittenberg, Breslau, and Leipzig, moved to Padua to study medicine under the guidance of Giovan Battista da Monte, whose lectures, consultations, and commentaries on Galen he subsequently collected and edited. Crato rapidly acquired a good reputation as a practicing physician and, back in his country, gained the position of personal doctor of three subsequent Holy Roman emperors (Ferdinand I, Maximilian II, and Rudolph II). Girolamo Mercuriale also studied in Padua. He spent seven years in Rome (1562–69) as personal physician of the Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. While at the cardinal’s court, Mercuriale wrote the De arte gymnastica (1569), probably his most famous work. In 1569 he moved back to Padua, where he taught medicine until 1587, before concluding his academic career in Bologna first and finally in Pisa. The seventy letters published in the book under review are the extant portion of a denser epistolary exchange covering more than a decade: from their encounter in Vienna until Crato’s death in 1585. Only nine of the extant letters are written by Crato. Most of Mercuriale’s original ones are bound in three manuscripts of the University Library of Wroclaw, and six letters by Crato are held in the collections of the Ambrosiana Library in Milan. The book also reproduces five letters already published at the end of the sixteenth century: one by Crato in Antonio Riccobono De Gymnasio Patavino (1598); two by each author were printed in Crato’s Consilia et Epistolae Medicinales, edited by Lorenz Scholtz (1592–95). Jean-Michel Agasse, a scholar who has extensively published on Mercuriale, provides the transcription of the correspondence (the Latin text was established in collaboration with Concetta Pennuto), as well as an excellent translation of the original texts into French. The epistolary corpus is introduced by a conspicuous and useful essay of 130 pages where Agasse contextualizes and analyzes the content of the correspondence. Letter writing, in this period, constitutes a diffused cultural practice among doctors. It was primarily used for professional purposes, such as describing cases, comparing diagnoses, discussing old and new therapies, asking or proposing advices, and commenting on recent medical publications or new editions of ancient texts. These aspects are dominant in the Crato-Mercuriale correspondence, and some letters deal with characteristics particularly interesting for the specific field of early modern history of medical theory and practice: for example, the description of the autopsy of Maximilian II (pp. 144–147); some frank judgment about recent medical publications; and, above all, the discussion on contagion theory prompted by contemporary epidemics of plague (pp. 152–157) and catarrhal fever (pp. 212–231). Interestingly, the discussion on contagion reveals some divergences of the two physicians about the origin and diffusion of the epidemic diseases, as well as the rise of criticisms, doubts, and hesitations concerning the current and standard interpretation based on Hippocrates and Galen’s writings. In the introduction, Jean-Michel Agasse provides useful comments on most of these medical discussions (pp. 57–86), as well as on the recurrent concerns the two physicians express for their own health (both suffered from kidney stone disease) [End Page 552] or for that of powerful patrons (especially the emperor) or some mutual friends. However, the introduction is mostly...