This article examines the alchemical ideas and practices of the sixteenth-century Italian surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti.

The outbreak of syphilis in Europe elicited a variety of responses concerning the disease's origins and cure. In this essay, I examine the theory of the origins of syphilis advanced by the 16th-century Italian surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti. According to Fioravanti, syphilis was not new but had always existed, although it was unknown to the ancients. The syphilis epidemic, he argued, was caused by cannibalism among the French and Italian armies during the siege of Naples in 1494. Fioravanti's strange and novel (...) theory is connected with his view of disease as corruption of the body caused by eating improper foods. His theory of bodily pollution, a metaphor for the corruption of society, coincided with Counter-Reformation concepts about sin and the social order. (shrink)

Edgar Zilsel's famous thesis, which argues that modern experimental science was born from the union of artisans and intellectuals in the 16th century, received little support when Zilsel proposed it in the 1940s. In recent years, however, with the turn toward social and cultural history of science, the “Zilsel Thesis” has undergone something of a revival as historians rethink the relevance of artisanal knowledge for the history of early modern science. This essay looks at the Zilsel Thesis in a global (...) setting – specifically a colonial Iberian setting – and argues for its relevance in framing natural history, medicine, and the impact of science on everyday life. Using the examples of corn, quina, and cochineal, this essay argues that the agronomic, chemical, and entomological knowledge accumulated over generations of practice by indigenous practitioners was in fact artisanal knowledge that was passed on to European intellectuals in “global trading zones” to become part of the Western scientific patrimony. (shrink)