Petrarch's Letter to Boccaccio 'On the Proud and Presumptuous Behaviour of Physicians'

From the James Lind Library Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine; 2016, Vol. 109(9) 347–353 DOI: 10.1177/0892705716663088 Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio ‘on the proud and presumptuous behaviour of physicians’ IML Donaldson University of Edinburgh & Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH2 1JQ, UK Corresponding author: IML Donaldson. Email: [email protected] 2 3 4 Dealing with translations of translations Invectiva – for example, Struever; Trone; Quillen; Carlino;5 Wallis;6 Park.7 In 1982, an article tracing the evolution of the clinical Siraisi8 says: trial was published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.1 This article has been a useful source of In the Contra medicum Petrarch deployed his unpar- several of the records included in the James Lind alleled mastery of Latin rhetoric in a stream of vitu- Library. One of these is the quotation of a passage peration. In particular, medicine is repeatedly from the writings of the 14th-century Italian poet attacked for its pretensions to rhetorical and philo- Petrarch in which the design of a controlled clinical sophical learning, although it is allowed a modest trial is clearly conceptualised. However, a British sci- place as a mechanical art. ence journalist, Robert Matthews, recently suggested that some key elements of this conceptualisation had Petrarch elevated moral over natural philosophy been omitted both from the image of the facsimile of and as a consequence, poetry and rhetoric as both the manuscript in the James Lind Library and from more effective and more desirable occupations than the translation of the key passage. The current article were efforts to influence the course of nature by investigates the history of successive versions of mechanical manipulation. the key passage, shows how the English translation By this time in his life, Petrarch was collecting came to be incomplete and inaccurate, and provides a his correspondence into books, on the model of the new English translation and interpretation of the key letters of Cicero and, between 1361 and 1373, he col- passage. lected what became a book of the correspondence of Petrarch was famously a relentless critic of phys- his old age. The book appeared in manuscript then in icians. Following the great plague of the mid-14th various printed editions with a variety of titles. In the century, Petrarch became bitterly critical of doctors first printed edition, that of 1501,9 it is called Epistole and all their works. An exchange of letters with Pope rerum senilium. C.xxviij. divise in libris xviii ‘Letters Clement VI in 1351, when Petrarch advised him to concerning matters of old age. 128 [letters] divided avoid consulting doctors during his illness, and the into 18 books’. In the Basel edition of 1581,9 it is response of one of the Pope’s physicians in 1352, led Epistolarum de Rebus Senilibus, Libri XVI. ‘Sixteen to Petrarch’s composing in 1353 his most famous and books of letters concerning matters of old age’. extended attack, the four books of the Invectiva In more modern times, the title is often given simply contra medicum. This may be translated either as as Seniles, the title I shall use here. As the titles suggest, ‘An attack on a doctor’ or as ‘An attack on medi- the collections are not uniform in their content or in cine’. Modern references to this work sometimes the numbering of the letters. For the avoidance of abbreviate the more complete titles given in earlier doubt, the letter of interest here is the third letter sources; for example, in the version of the collected in the fifth book of both the collection published by works published in Basel in 1554 and 1581, the title is di Asola in 1501 and the manuscript Biblioteca Invectivarum contra medicum quendam Lib IIII; that is Marciana Lat. XI, 17/Francesco Petrarca, which was ‘Four books of attacks against a certain doctor’ (my reproduced in facsimile in 2003.9 In the latter, a note in italics). In his subsequent writing, Petrarch insisted the left margin in a later hand labels the letter Lib IV on the distinction saying that he was not attacking ep. 4, but, in the manuscript, it is the third letter of the medicine but rather its practice by particular phys- fifth book as can easily be verified. icians. But this claim conceals more than it reveals. Against this background, we now turn to this third For details, see modern scholarly analyses of the letter of the fifth book of the Seniles which was ! IML Donaldson 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav Downloaded from jrs.sagepub.com at The Royal Society of Medicine on September 23, 2016 348 Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 109(9) addressed to Giovanni Boccaccio, a fellow poet. The facsimile edition of the Seniles (Seniles, 2003 pp. printed editions have short titles summarising the XXIII – XXVIII). An enlarged image of the relevant content at the head of each letter which differ section of the letter is reproduced on the James Lind across the editions and were presumably added by Library website and in Figure 1 below. the editors, that in the 1501 edition is: Ad eundem The manuscript of the Seniles in the Marciana de audacia et pomposa medicorum habitum ‘To the Codex Lat. XI 17 is written by at least two different same [i.e. to Boccaccio to whom the preceding two hands on paper dating from the end of the 14th letters were addressed] on the proud and presumptu- or beginning of the 15th century. Its origin is prob- ous behaviour of physicians’. ably from the region around Verona. The first The letter was occasioned by Boccaccio’s having hand, up to and including folium 3 recto, would written to Petrarch some time earlier – Petrarch appear to be that of a professional copyist writing a cannot now recall when – to say he had been ill but late, small, formal Italian gothic rotunda (a script had recovered ‘.... by the grace of God and with the whose letters are more rounded than in other con- help of a doctor’. Petrarch had replied expressing his temporary formal writing) on paper ruled with silver- astonishment that his friend should hold with such a point in two columns. Initial capitals of the first common error and insisting that it was the Grace of part are decorated in colour (rubricated). The text God and his sound constitution that had cured him from folium 3 verso to the end is written in a regular and that the physician had done nothing – indeed, gothic script, a small Italian bastarda (a variety ‘had the power to do nothing beyond the ability of of small, cursive – ‘joined-up’ – handwriting). It is a chattering gossip with nothing to do but waste time probably the work of a single hand, on unruled and no cures to offer’. But now Boccaccio has replied paper with some ornamentation to the initial cap- to Petrarch’s letter and Petrarch is no longer aston- itals added by one or more additional hands in ished at his recovery because now he has been told black ink. From its writing and other characteristics, that ‘during your illness you by no means had this manuscript may be a personal copy from the recourse to a physician’. The letter continues over time that Petrarch’s manuscripts were being pages, denying the usefulness, competence and some- organised and diffused among Venetian humanist times the honesty of doctors and saying that, if they circles about a quarter of a century after the poet’s are ill, they are not so foolish as to follow their own death. remedies. In the course of this diatribe, Petrarch calls as The source of the quotation as it has been witnesses a few doctors and cites their admissions used by modern writers about the ineffectiveness of their remedies. It is one of these witnesses who has been quoted as an early The passage is quoted by Lilienfeld1 in his article on example of division of a collection of similar patients the origins of clinical trials. He gives the text taken suffering from the same disease into two equal groups from an English translation published in 1889 of an to be exposed to different regimens of treatment – or earlier French work, but abbreviates it. Here, I give non-treatment – and the outcomes compared. the whole passage from Lilienfeld’s source10 for rea- Given Petrarch’s famously low opinion of the prac- sons which will appear. I have put in italic the words tice of medicine, we may wonder whether the ‘famous which Lilienfeld omitted: doctor’ whose opinion is quoted in the letter was real or was a fiction – a rhetorical device to give weight to I once heard a physician of great renown among us Petrarch’s own opinion by putting it in the mouth of a express himself in the following terms: ‘‘I cannot physician who enjoyed a good reputation among his ignore the fact that I shall be treated as an ingrate if professional peers. Since, at present, I do not know I lied in regard to an art by means of which I have how this question could be resolved, I shall continue acquired riches and many friends, but truth should be to write as though the doctor and his opinion were placed above all affection. I solemnly affirm and real, but the reader should bear in mind that we believe, if a hundred or a thousand of men of the cannot be certain whether we are hearing the view of same age, same temperament and habits, together a real physician or only that of Petrarch himself.

Load more