Medical competence, anatomy and the polity in seventeenth-century Rome.
At the centre of this article are two physicians active in Rome between 1600 and 1630 who combined medical practice with broader involvement in the dynamic cultural, economic and political scene of the centre of the Catholic world. The city's distinctive and very influential social landscape magnified issues of career-building and allows us to recapture physicians’ different strategies of self-fashioning at a time of major social and religious reorganization. At one level, reconstructing Johannes Faber and Giulio Mancini's medical education, arrival in Rome and overlapping but different career trajectories contributes to research on physicians’ identity in early modern Italian states. Most remarkable are their access to different segments of Roman society, including a dynamic art market, and their diplomatic and political role, claimed as well as real. But following these physicians from hospitals to courts, including that of the Pope, and from tribunals to the university and analysing the wide range of their writing – from medico-legal consilia to political essays and reports of anatomical investigations – also enriches our view of medical practice, which included, but went beyond, the bedside. Furthermore, their activities demand that we reassess the complex place of anatomical investigations in a courtly society, and start recovering the fundamental role played by hospitals – those quintessential Catholic institutions – as sites of routine dissections for both medical teaching and research. (pp. 551–567)
Parcours de praticien et savoir historique : quelles histoires pour un médecin polygraphe ?
En partant de fonds d’archives laisses par un medecin actif a la fin de l’Ancien Regime, l’objectif de cet article est d’explorer les pistes de recherche et les apports heuristiques d’une analyse de type biographique de ces fonds. Des problematiques quant au statut de la medecine, a l’economie de la pratique, a la relation therapeutique et au rapport entretenu par le praticien avec le savoir medical seront abordees. Au cours du travail, des questions methodologiques emergent. Quelle est la specificite des donnees issues de la confrontation des donnees individuelles avec un contexte specifique ? Est-il possible, a partir du cas singulier, de penser autrement l’histoire du groupe social dont il fait partie ? Quelles autres realites historiques sont accessibles a partir de l’histoire d’un sujet ?
The papal prince : one body and two souls : the papal monarchy in early modern Europe
A survey of the papal monarchy in early modern Europe, concentrating on the relationship between spiritual and temporal authority during the emergence of the papal state, which the author sees as the "prototype" of the contemporary sovereign state.