Sponsored by the Office for History of Science and Technology (UC Berkeley)
And the History of Health Sciences Program (UCSF)
William Eamon
Regents Professor of History
New Mexico State University
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The Canker Friar: Piety and Intrigue in an Era of New Diseases
This is a story from the Venetian archive. It is about syphilis, the Renaissance medical marketplace, piety, jealousy, and betrayal. Its leading character is Antonio Volpe, a Dominican Friar who was famous in mid-sixteenth-century Venice as the "Canker Friar" because of his prized remedies for the French Pox, which he manufactured in his distillery in the Campo Frari. Fra Volpe made a lot of money from his Mal francese treatments. The only reason we know about him is because one of his debtors, a local physician, denounced him to the Inquisition in order to avoid paying a debt he owed the friar. Volpe's trial of 1567 demonstrates the intense competition in the Venetian medical marketplace and the opportunities presented to healers by new diseases like the French Disease. The Pox was, in a way, ideally suited to the methods of empirical healers: while the doctors struggled to fit the disease into their theoretical paradigm, desperate victims went to those who claimed the ability to cure it.
4:00PM
Monday, February 5, 2007
140 Barrows Hall
UC Berkeley
Co-Sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies
Office for History of Science and Technology, 543 Stephens Hall #2350
University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2350
tel: (510) 642-4581, e-mail: ohst@berkeley.edu
