708 william eamon
Humanism and Medicine: Tradition and InnovationWhile mathematics and mechanics dominated humanistic scientific
activity in Venice, the presence of a distinguished medical faculty at the
University of Padua meant that the republic could also boast a galaxy of
medical humanists. Galen still reigned supreme at Padua (as elsewhere
in italy), despite challenges to his teachings from anatomists, disciples
of the Swiss medical reformer Paracelsus, and other medical innovators.
academic Galenists were notoriously suspicious of philosophical
innovations and held in disdain almost any medical theory or practice
that threatened their entrenched interests.
Medical humanists launched a particularly hostile attack on the pow-
erful influence of the Canon of the eleventh-century arabic philosopher
ibn Sina, known to the latins as avicenna (d. 1037), which had gained a
strong foothold in the medical curriculum of the universities.25 although
the attack on avicenna had begun in the late Middle ages, the acces-
sibility of Greek medical works in the original gave humanists new tools
by which to identify specific errors in the arabic tradition. Padua, gener-
ally regarded as the best medical school in europe, stood at the forefront
of the 16th-century movement to replace avicenna with a “pure” ancient
legacy.
Giovanni Battista da Monte (1489–1551), a professor of practical medi-
cine at Padua, was one of the most outspoken critics of avicenna. The
leading architect of the definitive Giunti latin edition of Galen (1541), da
Monte introduced clinical medicine into Padua curriculum and was one of
the main proponents of establishing a botanical garden at the university.26
Vettore Trincavella (1496–1568), another leading professor at Padua, pro-
duced what is generally considered the best collection of latin texts of
Galen ever published in the renaissance.27
Venice itself also boasted important medical humanists, including
many who were not part of the faculty at Padua. although ermolao Bar-
baro (1454–93) was not a physician, in 1481 he made a latin translation of
dioscorides’s (fl. a.d. 50–70) De materia medica, the most comprehensive
25 nancy Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The canon and Medical Teaching in
Italian Universities after 1500 (Princeton, 1987).
26 Jerome J. Bylebyl, “The School of Padua: Humanistic Medicine in the Sixteenth
century,” in charles Webster, ed., Health, Medicine, and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century
(cambridge, 1979), p. 346.
27 Martin Sicherl, Die griechischen Erstausgaben des Vettore Trincavelli (Paderborn,
1993).