Cynthia Klestinec

Practical Experience in Anatomy

Often flagged as an origin of empiricism, experience has a range of meanings in the context of early modern natural philosophy and medicine. It has been aligned with practical knowledge, knowledge of contingent effects, and the un-theorized perception of phenomena accessible to the senses. In the realm of anatomical inquiry, experience joined reason to constitute (according to Galen, Mondino, Berengario da Carpi, Niccolo Massa and many others) the approved anatomical method. For medical students, however, experience also meant manual skill and expertise (peritia). Students celebrated the manual expertise – the ability to cut open corpses and by dissecting internal and external structures, reveal them to the audience – of their professors and their peers. In Padua, the home of the famous anatomical theater of 1595, students connected these features of anatomical inquiry with private anatomical exercises rather than public demonstrations, especially those given by Giulio Casseri. This paper queries the private settings in which anatomical knowledge was produced and the roles that private anatomies played in recharging the meaning of experience and embodied knowledge in the fields of anatomy and surgery. Using the exchange between students, professors and local practitioners in Padua and Venice, this paper aims to reconsider the role of practical experience in anatomical training and its connection to learned surgeons and anatomists rather than the rustic ignorance of empirics or the secrets of women.

Translating Learned Surgery

This essay explores the increasingly visible or strong relationship between educated surgeons and artisans that can be documented in vernacular translations of Latin surgery texts in the sixteenth century. We often consider the vernacular as a tool for broad dissemination, but vernacular translation was used by educated surgeons for more calculated, professional reasons. In vernacular texts, they began to articulate their role and responsibilities in urban settings (rather than military settings). This essay focuses on the Latin and Italian surgery texts of Giovanni Andrea della Croce, a Venetian, educated surgeon, who began to frame (in text and image) his work according to aspects of artisanal traditions.

Renaissance Surgery Between Learning and Craft

In Spring 2015, the present authors met at a conference and bemoaned the relative paucity of scholarship on Renaissance surgery, a time that saw the rise of fire weapons and corresponding wounds, the emergence of a seemingly unknown disease from the New World, and the publication of major ancient treatises. We were struck, in contrast, by the richness of scholarship on the history of anatomy and the variety of methodological approaches it displays—intellectual history and the history of philosophy, history of the book, social history, and visual and literary studies. Our exchange led to a workshop held at Indiana University, Bloomington, in October of that year; the present collection stems from papers delivered on that occasion. The essays collected in this special issue present some key elements of a much larger puzzle: the relationship among medical teachers, practitioners, and texts; the responses to traditional and novel medical conditions; and the navigation of professional concerns in systems of care that were undergoing gradual but consequential change. In order to sharpen the focus of our collection, we have grouped the essays around common themes, and we very much hope that the present collection will be seen as a useful starting point for broader and more extensive investigations. The essays by Michael McVaugh, Allen Shotwell, and Cynthia Klestinec investigate encounters between surgery and learned medicine, illuminating the shifting boundaries between surgery and physic and the relationship between theory, practice, and skills. In different ways, they reveal the evolving outlines of the surgeon’s professional identity

Renaissance Surgeons: Anatomy, Manual Skill and the Visual Arts

By the second half of the sixteenth century, anatomy had become a conflicted resource for surgeons. Emphasized in a clinical context, anatomical experience was connected not only to less error, but to a practitioner’s violent approach to the living body of the patient. Taking the case study of two practitioners in late sixteenth-century Venice, this essay explores the problem of anatomy and the emergence of a more robust language of manual skill, with terms drawn from the visual arts.