Apothecaries, Medicinal Retailing, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Venice, 1565-1730 by ...

301 Pages·2015·3.46 MB·English

Marketing Nature: Apothecaries, Medicinal Retailing, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern
Venice, 1565-1730

by
Sean David Parrish
Department of History
Duke University

Date:_______________________
Approved:

___________________________
John Jeffries Martin, Supervisor

___________________________
Thomas Robisheaux

___________________________
Peter Sigal

___________________________
Valeria Finucci

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy in the Department of
History in the Graduate School
of Duke University

2015
ABSTRACT
Marketing Nature: Apothecaries, Medicinal Retailing and Scientific Culture in Early Modern
Venice, 1565-1730

by
Sean David Parrish
Department of History
Duke University

Date:_______________________
Approved:

___________________________
John Jeffries Martin, Supervisor

___________________________
Thomas Robisheaux

___________________________
Peter Sigal

___________________________
Valeria Finucci

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of
History in the Graduate School of
Duke University

2015
Copyright by
Sean David Parrish
2015
Abstract

This dissertation examines the contributions of apothecary craftsmen and their
medicinal retailing practices to emerging cultures of scientific investigation and
experimental practice in the Italian port city of Venice between 1565 and 1730. During
this important period in Europe’s history, efforts to ground traditional philosophical
investigations of nature in a new material culture of empirical and experimental practice
elicited significant debate in scholarly communities. Leading the way in advancing the
authority of “experience” were Europe’s medical practitioners divided between
university-trained physicians and guild-regulated apothecaries and surgeons. In Italy,
humanist praise for the practical arts and new techniques of analyzing inherited texts
influenced sixteenth-century university physicians to redefine the medical discipline in
terms of its practical aims to intervene in nature and achieve useful effects. This led to an
important revival in northern Italian universities at Ferrara and Padua of the classical
Greek writings on the empirical disciplines of anatomy and pharmacy. In the sixteenth
century the university at Padua, under the patronage of the Republic of Venice, was the
site of Europe’s first public botanical garden, anatomical theater and clinical
demonstrations. The university also hosted important experimental practitioners such as
Andreas Vesalius, Galileo Galilei and William Harvey, and remained a leading center of
medical investigation attracting an international faculty of students and professors until
the eighteenth century. At the same time, the study of Aristotelian natural philosophy in
original Greek texts was largely emancipated from the faculty of theology at Padua,
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nurturing innovative discourses on experimental method by figures such as Giacomo
Zabarella and the anatomist Fabricius Aquapendente.
The unique intellectual climate at Padua has thus attracted significant scholarly
attention in the history and philosophy of early modern science. However, the
university’s important relationships with the thriving world of artisan guilds and their
commercial practices in the nearby city of Venice have not received due attention in
historical scholarship. To address this issue, this dissertation focuses upon a unique group
of guild-trained medical practitioners in Venice – apothecaries – to trace the circulations
of materials, skills, and expertise between Padua and the Venetian marketplace. Drawing
on the methods of urban history, medical anthropology, literary studies and intellectual
history, I conceptualize Venice as an important “contact zone,” or space of dialogue
between scholarly and artisanal modes of investigating and representing nature between
the latter sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. In particular, I focus upon emerging
apothecary strategies for retailing nature to public audiences through their medicinal
creations, printed books, licensing petitions, and their pharmacy shops. Through these
practices, apothecaries not only marketed commercial remedies during a period of
growing interest in pharmaceutical matters, but also fashioned their own expertise as
learned medical practitioners linking both theory and practice; head and hand; natural
philosophy and practiced skill. In 1565 Venice’s apothecaries made their first effort to
define their trade as a liberal profession in establishing a College of Apothecaries that
lasted until 1804. Already by the turn of the eighteenth century, however, Venice’s
apothecaries had adopted the moniker as “Public Professors” and engaged in dialogue
with leading professors at Padua for plans to institute a new school of “experimental
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medical chemistry” with the prior of the apothecary college proposed as its first public
demonstrator. Looking to a wide variety of statements on the urban pharmacy in Venice
in published medical books, pharmacopeias, trade manuals, literary works, civic rituals
and archival licensing and regulatory decrees, I trace the evolution of the public
apothecary trade in Venice, paying particular attention to the pharmacy’s early modern
materialization as a site of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the artisan
workshop and the university world inhabited by scholars.
My readings of these sources lead to three important conclusions regarding the
significance of apothecary retailing to the scientific culture of early modern Italy. First,
the urban terrain of artisan practice in a merchant republic must be placed alongside the
traditionally studied princely courts and universities as a fertile ground for dialogue
between artisans and scholars in the study of nature. Second, apothecary investments in
processing and retailing nature during this period made significant contributions to the
material culture of early modern science in both mediating a growing pharmacopeia of
exotic materials imported from around the globe, and in fashioning workshop models for
the first university chemical laboratories instituted at Padua in the eighteenth century.
And third, apothecary marketing strategies expressing their own medical expertise over
nature’s materials articulated a fusion of textual learning and manual skill that offered
some of the earliest profiles of the experimental practitioner that was eventually adopted
in the public discourse of the experimental New Sciences by the latter seventeenth
century.

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Dedication
To my family, Lynn, Dave and Brad.

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Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………....……..iv.

List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………….x.

List of Abbreviations…………………….……………………….…..………...….….....xi.

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………….……..…………xii.

Introduction: The Public Culture of Pharmacy in Early Modern Venice…….…..….……1

Chapter One: New Worlds/Ancient Texts: Medical Humanism and Medical Botany
in Sixteenth-Century Northern Italy……………………………….….…………27

1.1 Introduction: A Medicine Cabinet of the World……………….….…....……27

1.2 Humanism, Philosophy and the Art of Medicine at Ferrara, 1490-1530.....…35

1.3 Confronting Novelties: Syphilis and the Guaiacum Cure…………...………47

1.4 Staging Knowledge: The University Nature Theaters…………….…………58

Chapter Two: Pharmacy and City: Medicinal Retailers and Regulators in Venice……...67

2.1 Introduction: The Urban Stage of Medical Authority…………….………….67

2.2 Medicinal Regulations in Medieval and Renaissance Venice…….…………71

2.3 Inquisitors and Health Inspectors in the Pharmacy………………………….81

2.4 Founding the Venetian College of Apothecaries………….………………..101

Chapter Three: Tricks of the Trade: Experience, Skill and Experiment in
Apothecary Trade Manuals……………………………………….……………109

3.1 Introduction: Tricksters in the Marketplace……………….……………….109

3.2 Arab Polypharmacy and Calestani’s ‘Osservazioni’………….……………114

3.3 Skill and Innovation at the Sign of the Ostrich………………….…………123
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3.4 Artisans, Anatomists and Experience………………….…………………...131

Chapter Four: The Satyr in the Pharmacy: Dissection and Invention at the Sign of
the San Liberale……………………….………....………………………….….142

4.1 Introduction: Baconian Investigators on the Venetian Lido…….…....……142

4.2 The Shopkeepers’ Academy: Apothecaries and Collaborative Learning….158

4.3 Dissecting Emblems: Poisonous Mollusks and Satirical Truth-
Tellers…………………………………………………………………….…....166

4.4 Transmutational Poetics: Experiment and Chemical Remedies……...……179

Chapter Five: Chemical Theaters: Apothecary Laboratories and Chemical Debate
in Venice and Europe………………………………………………………….192

5.1 Introduction: Apothecaries and Alchemical Marketing……………......….192

5.2 Alchemical Medicine and Dsitilling in Europe and Venice…….…………202

5.3 Venetian Laboratories and Chemical Debate in Venice and Europe….…..212

5.4 Between Marketplace and University: The Golden Hercules Pharmacy
and the Republic of Letters……………………………………………………237

Conclusion: Guildsmen and Early Modern Science…………….…………………….252

Appendix: Apothecaries and Apothecary Publications in the Republic of Venice……261

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….…..269

Biography………………………………………………………………………….…..286

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List of Figures

1. A cuirmador di banca collecting snakes for the making of Theriac (1563)……91

2. Antonio Donati’s “Marine Satyr” of 1631…………………………………….144

3. The American “Shark Stone” from Antonio Donati’s Trattato de’semplici…..163

4. Giullaume Rondelet’s third species of the “Sea Hare” from 1620……………169

5. The Tethys fimbria species found in the Adriatic and Mediterranean….…..…109

6. Conrad Gesner’s “Marine Satyr” reproduced from the 1620 edition…………171

7. Fabio Colonna’s rendering of the “Sea Hare” from 1616…………………….172

8. The 1682 fronstispeice of Antonio de Sgobbis’ Theatro Farmaceutico….…..220

9. Portrait plates of the apothecary owners of the Ostrich pharmacy…….….…..221

10. Depiction of various chemical instruments from the Theatro Farmacuetico...222

11. The self-distilling “Aloe Americana” plant investigated by
Antonio Vallisneri (1715)…………………………………………………….236

12. The pharmacy at the Ercole d’Oro as it exists today…………………………238

13. Girolamo Zannichelli’s design for his machine to distill the sun’s rays……..241

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