Abstract
This article analyzes the career of Giovanni Battista Cortesi (1552-1643)-the son of a poor tailor who started his career as barber and steam bath attendant and became university professor at Bologna and Messina-and places it in the context of the profession of surgery in early modern Italy. The article investigates how a surgeon had to establish close relationships with universities, civic authorities, wealthy upper-class patients, hospitals as sites of clinical education and acquisition of manual skills, the printing industry and the book market, and students. Moreover, the article explores the fluidity of professional and cultural boundaries between learned and empirical knowledge from the perspective of a graduate surgeon who was not supposed to be. Finally, the article aims at describing the figure of the "graduate surgeon," typical of the Italian medical landscape.
Highlights
This article looks at the fluidity between professional and cultural boundaries between artisanal and learned knowledge making from the perspective of a learned, graduate surgeon who was not supposed to be.[9]
Most Renaissance surgery books—be they treatises organized according to kinds of illnesses and injuries, or booklets built around specific cases or controversies—included a sort of description of the ideal surgeon
A special stipend of six hundred lire for his military services figures in the account books of the Senate in 1595,64 and in 1598 Cortesi was appointed to the more official role of military surgeon of the city, a job that depended directly on the Senatorial commission for military affairs, and was paid from a special fund allocated to military affairs.[65]
Summary
Summary: This article analyzes the career of Giovanni Battista Cortesi (1552– 1643)—the son of a poor tailor who started his career as barber and steam bath attendant and became university professor at Bologna and Messina—and places it in the context of the profession of surgery in early modern Italy. This article looks at the fluidity between professional and cultural boundaries between artisanal and learned knowledge making from the perspective of a learned, graduate surgeon who was not supposed to be.[9] Cortesi’s career path covers almost all the different figures of what could be defined the early modern surgical spectrum. Before turning to his professional trajectory, the article sketches a picture of surgical practice in sixteenth-century Bologna, and traces a group portrait of Cortesi’s contemporary colleagues, who were both friends and rivals. Someone like Cortesi, who moved across the boundaries of the early modern surgical spectrum, took advantage of this environment in the most spectacular way
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