PROFESSOR OF SECRETS: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy

To some of his contemporaries in Milan of the 1570s, Leonardo Fioravanti was a dangerous quack, to others a saviour who pointed the way forward to new ways of healing, not without the help of a little alchemy along the way. This detailed study sets out to find the truth about a Renaissance healer celebrated and reviled in his own time. Fioravanti arrived in Milan from Venice, where he had been accused of fraud by the College of Physicians, yet in Spain he had been hailed for his new treatment of gunshot wounds. Unlike many medical practitioners of the day, Fioravanti did not peddle his cures in the street, but wrote popular books and perfected the art of advertising. There was a curious contradiction in Fioravanti's approach which on the one hand espoused the Renaissance experimental method, yet he also expressed disgust at the public dissections of hanged corpses during which the celebrity surgeon Vesalius would demonstrate the scientific basis of new medical advances. Fioravanti was one of the "professors of secrets" whose experimentation verged on the occult and alchemical. It is unclear whether he went to medical school, and the records of Bologna University do not record his graduation, but he clearly received medical training, and the likelihood is that he apprenticed himself to a surgeon. His success in conducting a splenectomy to prove the body can do without a spleen not only cured the patient but also became a publicity stunt when Fioravanti promoted his skills by displaying the organ in the market place. Fioravanti was one of a group who rejected the prevailing wisdom that curing bodies was a matter of adjusting the bodily fluids or humours, believing instead that the disease itself should be treated with a combination of surgery and medicine. Although Fioravanti's name has not survived as a pioneer, this was the way forward in the modern age. 368pp, illus.