From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the Italian Protomedicato
tribunals, Colleges of Physicians, or Health Offices (jurisdiction
varied from state to state) required charlatans to submit their
wares for inspection and, upon approval, pay a licence fee in order
to set up a stage from which to perform and sell them. The
licensing of charlatans became an administrative routine. As far as
the medical magistracies were concerned, charlatans had a
defineable identity, constituting a specific trade or occupation.
This book studies the way charlatans were represented, by
contemporaries and by historians, how they saw themselves and, most
importantly, it reconstructs the place of charlatans in early
modern Italy. It explores the goods and services charlatans
provided, their dealings with the public and their marketing
strategies. It does so from a range of perspectives: social,
cultural, economic, political, geographical, biographical and, of
course, medical. Charlatans are not just some curiosity on the
fringes of medicine: they offered health care to an extraordinarily
wide sector of the population. Moreover, from their origins in
Renaissance Italy, the Italian ciarlatano was the prototype for
itinerant medical practitioners throughout Europe. This book offers
a different look at charlatans. It is the first to take seriously
the licences issued to charlatans in the Italian states, compiling
them into a 'charlatans database' of over 1,300 charlatans active
throughout Italy over the course of some three centuries. In
addition, it makes use of other types of archival documents, such
as trial records and wills, to give the charlatans a human face, as
well as a wide range of artistic and printed sources, not
forgetting the output of the charlatans themselves, in the form of
handbills and pamphlets.
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