724 william eamon
set up shop and competed for patients, some legally, others not. it was a
surprisingly specialized group of medical providers, including experts in
treating cataracts, fractures, abscesses, hernias, and bladder stones. The
piazzas swarmed with itinerant healers competing with one another and
with regular doctors. charlatans in bright costumes pitched their wares
and acted out comedies. Tooth drawers set up temporary shop in the
squares and hung out banners advertising their services. Herb women
offered a potion for whatever ailed you, while druggists and distillers
produced a steady supply of medicinal waters.
Tasked with controlling this swarm of practitioners was the Provvedi-
tori alla Sanità, or Public Health office. originally established to deal
with plague and other health emergencies, the Sanità eventually acquired
broad jurisdiction, including the licensing of medical practitioners. empir-
ics and charlatans also had to be licensed to sell their remedies in the city,
and were required to leave a sample of their remedies with the Sanità for
testing.68 Though required by law to register with the Health office, large
numbers of itinerant practitioners made their rounds of the piazzas and
moved on without notice. Finding and prosecuting offenders would have
been extremely difficult. indeed, only ten empirics were prosecuted for
operating without a license between 1545 and 1560, a lackluster enforce-
ment record that was intolerable to the college of Physicians. in 1567,
the college finally pressured the Health office to grant it the privilege of
examining and certifying the degrees and competencies of medical pro-
viders, rather than merely asking the college for its opinions concerning
qualifications. Under the new provisions, failure to obtain a license from
the college of Physicians carried a penalty of 18 months in the galleys.
although the charlatans (ciarlatani) who crowded the Piazza San Marco
came in many varieties and from many different places, they shared one
thing in common: all were itinerants who moved from city to city selling
their medical and household wares. in a treatise on medical errors, De
gli errori popolari d’Italia, first published in 1598, the physician and friar
Scipione Mercurio characterized the ciarlatani as “mountebanks, trinket-
sellers, jesters, and generally anyone who, from a platform set up in the
square, or from a horse, sells medicine, powders, compounds, and oils to
68 on the licensing of charlatans, see david Gentilcore, Medical Charlatanism in Early
Modern Italy (oxford, 2006), ch. 4.