Talking Science at the University of Padua in the Age of Antonio Vallisneri

Feingold run04.tex V1 - 07/20/2009 4:10pm Page 117 Talking Science at the University of Padua in the Age of Antonio Vallisneri Brendan Dooley Even for an accomplished scholar like Antonio Vallisneri, it was no simple matter to declaim extemporaneously in Latin before a public possibly demanding the best from a setting where Vesalius and Fabricius had once changed medical education forever in the West. Therefore successful completion of the inaugural lecture was a cause for celebration, so he wrote to the Tuscan grand ducal librarian Antonio Magliabechi in 1700: ‘Today is a holy day for me, since I made my solemn entrance into the university favoured by the applause of all the learned, the podesta` [of Padua] and the captain of the city’. The difficulty of the task was underscored by the special requirements of this setting: ‘I was able to speak for a whole hour with total clarity of memory and self-possession, such that I was myself surprised at my weak nature rendered so daring on this magnificently terrible occasion’. He recalled the unfortunate case of a law professor who failed at the same task ‘and died of woe a few days later’.1 But his work was far from done; and already as the school year began, he considered the daunting task before him: ‘I find the job particularly difficult, moreover, having to learn so many lessons by heart, which arrive at the number of eighty or more’2 As first professor of practical medicine, he was supposed to deliver a given number of lessons over portions of the period between September and June when classes were in session; and following a well-established custom, he walked into class each time without notes. Exactly what the students may have heard, and how the professor may have organized his ideas, the following pages will attempt to ascertain. The history of classroom instruction adds a new dimension not only to the history of universities, but to the emerging historiography of the oral culture of knowledge.3 From new kinds of evidence around Europe, we are finding out more and more about early modern teaching styles and their effects on students; and the same goes for early modern oral Feingold run04.tex V1 - 07/20/2009 4:10pm Page 118 118 History of Universities examinations and doctoral performances.4 These elements corresponding to acts of speech and hearing may now be examined in the light of what science historiography has already discovered concerning the rhetoric of scientific exposition.5 A forgotten world of scientific sociability is gradually coming into view, related but by no means identical to the world of the written text—and occasionally in conflict with the latter. The significance of this discovery is enormous, even if we grant that academic sociability in the forum of the voice was—and is—a quaint throwback to Medieval traditionalism, as is sometimes said.6 Vallisneri is a particularly apt case, at least regarding the university of Padua, because of the unusual amount of documentation. Apart from the vast correspondence consisting of over 10,000 letters that place him well within the ranks of communicators like Henry Oldenburg, there are several nearly complete years of lesson notes preseved in the original notes. Although student notes have apparently not survived to permit any comparison with these lecture notes, the material reveals the university lecture in this period to be an extraordinarily dynamic vehicle for the oral transmission of science—whether improvised or memorized (an extremely important distinction, as we will see). In what follows we will find Vallisneri diverging markedly from the topics and texts assigned to him in the class schedule, while at the same time filling his lectures with material drawn from his own personal research (whether related or not to the argument at hand). He was not the first example of these two related trends in the development of early modern teaching on natural philosophy (consider Geminiano Montanari, at Padua in the 1680s)7; nonetheless the documents in his regard are particularly impressive. On his arrival at Padua in 1700, Vallisneri quickly established the style of teaching that would be his trademark. He found the faculty divided between innovators (Pompeo Sacco, Domenico Guglielmini, and others) and traditionalists (Michelangelo Molinetti, Giacomo Viscardi, and others), with the latter enjoying a slight advantage.8 When delivering the festive inaugural lecture, he had still more cause for concern than the mere problem of correct delivery which we reported at the beginning of this paper. He was expected to take sides; instead he offered an uneasy compromise, as the title of the lecture proclaimed: ‘The Studies of the Moderns Do Not Overthrow the Medicine of the Ancients, But Confirm It’. No trace of this inaugural has yet been found except for Vallisneri’s own commentary in the autobiographical notes later Feingold run04.tex V1 - 07/20/2009 4:10pm Page 119 Talking Science at the University of Padua 119 published posthumously by Giovan Artico di Porcia. There the elements of a larger strategy emerge, whereby he apparently sought to pay false obeisance to the traditionalists in order to gain more freedom in expressing his own views. Here is what he later says about the general reception to the major theme of his lecture, and his subsequent practice: This reasoning of Vallisneri was greatly appreciated and praised by the majority of the professors and physicians, who were all followers of the ancient school. They hoped he would continue always to defend their old doctrines, whether good or bad. But in the lessons that he gave, subsequent to this, they noticed that instead he inclined to the moderns, although he attempted to reconcile cleverly the different systems, where he could. Nonetheless, as the two are often irreconcilable, he opposed the ancients with his usual candour and showed clearly where they went wrong.9 As time went by, the portion of the lectures devoted to his own research and that of his contemporaries increased, eventually crowding out the ancients almost entirely. According to his own testimony, his method of teaching was as follows: First he explained the text assigned for that year, of Hippocrates, Galen or Avicenna, exactly according to what was in the text, the connection and the linkage to the preceding texts, the intentions of the author and briefly what the most famous commentators said. Then he expounded everything that the Moderns would say on the same subject, more enlightened than the ancients by so many discoveries and experiments. Then he gave himself over to instructing his scholars regarding what the most famous Italians or Transalpines had discovered to be true, communicating to them always new insights, others’ and his own (which were by no means very few nor very trivial).10 An analysis of the teaching itself should reveal to what extent this account reflects what really transpired. As holder of the first chair in practical medicine, Vallisneri was supposed, at least according to the official published schedule, to base his first year of lessons on the first Fen of Avicenna’s Liber Canonis, entitled De Febribus. However, he paid little attention to this text. The entire three-year course on practical medicine was designed to provide an overview of all diseases of the human body from the head downward, concluding with general diseases; and the lessons De Febribus happened to occur in the last year of the cycle.11 In the autobiographical notes, which are the only account we have of this first year, Vallisneri claims to have liquidated the ancient text in the first lesson, finding it ‘full of obvious lies, regarding both the causes and the seat of fevers’.12 Even the definition of Feingold run04.tex V1 - 07/20/2009 4:10pm Page 120 120 History of Universities fevers was misleading; so he undertook to correct it in the light of modern developments regarding the circulation and qualities of the blood. The lessons of the following year, i.e., 1701, have come down to us in an apparently more direct form: that of a sheaf of manuscript notes, now preserved in the Biblioteca Augusta in Perugia.13 These refer to the first year of the three-year cycle, regarding diseases of the head (remember that Vallisneri in his first year, 1700–1, actually taught the third year of the cycle); and therefore they were repeated in 1704 and 1707, when the cycle returned. They reveal with the utmost clarity the basis of Vallisneri’s advice to Louis Bourguet—namely, that information concerning the official texts was better obtained at home than at the university. Far from commenting on the text of Galen’s Ars medica as stipulated in the statute (i.e., the text required on the exam), these lessons begin with another text, one attributed to Vallisneri’s sixteenth-century predecessor in the chair of practical medicine, namely Ercole Sassonia.14 The purpose appears to be purely provocative, since Ercole’s suggestion to pay close attention to work by the ninth-century Arab writer al-Razi (Abu¯ Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakar¯ıya al-Razi)¯ is never taken seriously as the lessons develop. In the first lesson Vallisneri takes up the problem of defining cephalgia or any kind of pain in the head, beginning with a variety of present and past opinions and ending with criteria based on the part of the area affected and the shape of the pain (egg-shaped, key-shaped). Next come five lessons all based on his current research and observations, which in these years concerned worms in the human body (work later published as Considerations and Experiments on the Generation of the Ordinary Worms of the Human Body15).

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