science and medicine in early modern venice 721
garden that would provide him with the materials that he would use in
teaching his course on medicinal plants. The Senate, concerned about
competition from institutions such as Pisa, complied with Bonafede’s
request, and by a 1545 decree provided a plot of land rented from the
monastery of San Giustina in Padua, creating the first university botanical
garden in italy. The botanist luigi anguillara (ca. 1512–70) was appointed
as its first prefect. in the 1557 edition of his commentary on dioscorides’s
De materia medica, the Sienese botanist Piero Mattioli could report that
“the illustrious Venetian Senate, persuaded by the most learned college
of Physicians of Padua and other distinguished doctors, has, a few years
ago, built in the city of Padua an ample garden for public enjoyment and
the ornament of medicine.”60
in adding natural history to the curriculum of the University of Padua,
the Venetian government helped to create a new scientific profession.61 By
giving the ancient discipline of natural history a permanent place in the
university curriculum, the authorities not only enhanced the intellectual
stature of natural history but also put in motion the process of creating
the disciplines of botany, zoology, and geology, distinct from medicine but
serving as complementary forms of natural knowledge.62 Much as anat-
omy emerged as an autonomous discipline, the natural history disciplines
developed into a distinct scientific profession.
The Medical World of Early Modern Veniceearly modern Venice had scores, if not hundreds, of medical providers.
at the top of the hierarchy that defined the republic’s medical world
stood the physicians. University educated and able to command high
fees, they were experts on diseases affecting the internal body, as opposed
to surgeons, who treated disorders of the outer body, such as fractures
and skin lesions. The theoretical foundation of the physician’s art was
the ancient doctrine of the four humors, which enabled physicians to
understand the all-important causes of sickness and to propose a cure.
Health and illness were primarily matters of balance and imbalance of the
four bodily humors—blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile—which
determined a person’s complexion. correspondingly, treatment consisted
60 Quoted in Findlen, “Market and the World,” p. 56.
61 Findlen, “Formation of a Scientific community.”
62 ogilvie, Science of Describing.