722 william eamon
of prescribing a diet and routine of life, or regimen, aimed at maintaining
or restoring the natural humoral balance. This was done by regulating
the so-called non-naturals, that is, by tailoring a patient’s diet, exercise,
and environmental conditions to achieve the optimum complexion and
restore the humors to their proper equipoise. The therapy was designed
primarily to maintain health; physicians were quite aware that their power
to change the course of an illness was limited.
Below the physicians in the hierarchy of medical providers stood the
surgeons. although surgeons occupied a lower rung on the ladder of the
medical professions than physicians, historians have tended to exaggerate
the division between the two. By the 15th century, some italian universi-
ties, including Padua, had begun offering courses and degrees in surgery.
Most university-trained surgeons became members of the Venetian col-
lege of Surgeons, which regulated their practice. The distinguished surgeon
and anatomist Gabriele Falloppio, for example, held the chair of anatomy
and surgery at Padua and became a member of the Venetian college of
Surgeons. ordinary barber-surgeons, in contrast, were not admitted to the
college of Surgeons but were instead enrolled in the barber’s guild. Mem-
bers of the Venetian college of Surgeons, who were better educated and
more highly respected than most historians have acknowledged, occupied
a position midway between the guild of barber-surgeons and the college
of Physicians. yet, while physicians could also practice surgery in Venice
(and did not shrink from doing so), surgeons could by no means prac-
tice medicine. To attempt to do so could incur severe penalties. in 1546,
Giacomo de Musis, a member of the Venetian college of Surgeons who
took a doctorate in surgery at Padua in 1543, was exiled from Venice for
18 months for failing to consult a physician in the case of a noblewoman
who died under his care.63
Barber-surgeons and midwives occupied the lowest rung on the hierarchy
of health professions. in theory, surgeons (whether members of the college
of Surgeons or the Guild of Barbers) intervened only under a physician’s
order as part of a prescribed cure. The reality, however, was quite differ-
ent. The barber-surgeon’s most common task, phlebotomy, was for many
patients a normal part of health maintenance: seasonal bloodlettings were
commonly self-prescribed as part of everyday health management. in addi-
tion to performing phlebotomies, the barber-surgeons were authorized to
63 richard Palmer, “Physicians and Surgeons in Sixteenth-century Venice,” Medical
History 23 (1979), 455.