Reading Celsus in Early Modern Italy
By Marquis Berrey
Early modern Italy probably counted more professional medical readers of the Roman encyclopediast Celsus' De medicina than did antiquity. After the copying of the Laurentian manuscript in the early fifteenth century and subsequent printing Celsus was read intensively among elite Italian practitioners, from the Florentine surgeon Antonio Benivieni (1443-1502) to Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682-1771), professor of anatomy at Padua. While both wrote influentially on Celsus, their discussions differed.
The Longue Durée of Classics and Successions in Ancient Scientific and Medical Traditions
By Paul Keyser
Reception studies of any body of material inscribe some of the material as “classical,” i.e., as of enduring worth, produced in an exceptional age, or by exceptional authors. That presumes that history is a process of decay, which produces a cognitive tension when the material is any ancient science, particularly medicine. If history is decay, there must be a “fall” between the ancient “golden” age and our present “iron” age. This “classicizing” approach is a trope in Greco-Roman scholarship, and is also manifested in several other ancient cultures.
The Big O”: Ancient Discourses on the Process of Female Pleasure
By Erin McKenna Hanses
Studies analyzing ancient conceptions of the female orgasm are misguided in that the Greeks and Romans appear not to have been focused on the woman’s experience of the completion of the sexual act, but rather on the process that leads to it. In other words, there was no female orgasm in antiquity. I argue that the ancient medical discussion of a woman’s pleasure in sexual intercourse focuses on her desire before sex and her pleasure during sex—not on the culmination of pleasure in the orgasm.
De Galeni Corporis Fabrica: Vesalius' use of Galen and Galenism in the Preface of his Fabrica
By Luis Salas
The publication of Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica in 1543 is often marked as a dramatic shift, not only in anatomical knowledge but also in anatomical method. Just over two centuries earlier in 1315, Mondino de Luzzi had famously conducted the public dissection of a human cadaver in Bologna. In his demonstration, Mondino lectured on select anatomical passages, often Galenic, while an assistant performed the manual dissection under direction of a second assistant.