Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey. Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy.

Abstract

This is an excellent, meticulously researched, and informative book about the growth of interest in preventive medicine and the broadening and changing nature of the “medicalization” of Italian culture and society from roughly 1550 to 1700. The authors are scrupulous in their attention to detail and in making sense of their sources, which are primarily regimens on health composed by physicians, inventories, and family correspondence from Roman households, and various artifacts of material culture, from canopied beds to weird-looking goblets and stylish ivory combs. They are rigorous in embedding their sources in the culture that produced them: the first chapter, for instance, gives us a clear and concise understanding of how and why physicians turned to authorship in the context of the rapid growth of print culture and the various professionalizing strategies of a host of writers, printers, and publishers. Cavallo and Storey are also particularly good at taking various cultural and social factors into account when thinking about the changes in medical trends they observe, linking the insights voiced in the regimens of health, for instance, to the ideas articulated in books of courtly manners and by the Counter-Reformation Church. Hence, while the authors make a case for the overall importance of medical culture when it comes to thinking about the changing habits of people in their everyday lives, from how they slept and what they ate, to how they washed, or exercised, or excreted, or thought about the air they were ineluctably forced to breath, they are careful not to overstate the case. “Were doctors,” they astutely ask, “simply adapting their advice to the transformations taking place around them and to the changing habits of their patients, or did they have a role in these changes?” (p. 9). The answer they arrive at through a careful contextualizing of their visual and verbal sources is, to be sure, both. Doctors were clearly “stimulated by these new lay and religiously inspired models of conduct and lifestyles” (p. 9) and, at the same time, they stimulated the changes in those models themselves. And that makes good sense. Then, as now, medicine had an important—but, as they observe, often overlooked—place in the history of comportment, design, household care, adornment, and consumption.