“The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy”, by William Eamon

368 pages, National Geographic, ISBN-13: 978-1426206504

Submitted for your approval: you are a respectable young man sitting in a lecture hall alongside many other respectable young men. All of you have paid an entry fee and are anxiously waiting for the show to begin. At one end of the hall there is a stage upon which stand two doctors with quite different views about many medical issues of the day. A third doctor appears and announces that he is about to perform an anatomical dissection – live – which is when the three cadavers are introduced to the audience, the bodies having belonged to criminals who were convicted either of murder or theft and which are now owned by the state. Doctor number three asks the audience to be quiet, and all of the idle banter ceases…

This kind of thing actually took place in Italy during the 16^th Century, when Andreas Vesalius, the Flemish anatomist, physician and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica – “On the Fabric of the Human Body” – arrived in Bologna to perform a series of anatomical demonstrations. Among those who attended one such show was Leonardo Fioravanti, then 23-years-old and the subject of The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy by William Eamon. Suffice to say, the young Bolognese was disgusted by what he saw, as the whole affair reminded him of a nothing more than a butcher’s shop and he concluded that doctors might know a lot about the various body organs, but when it comes to knowing the reasons for so many diseases their knowledge is almost nil. And so he sought to change all that by going “out into the world” in search of the Magna Medicina – “Great Medicine” – he hoped to discover the ancient panacea that would cure all illnesses.

With his book, Eamon chronicles the stranger-than-fiction life of surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti, the original “celebrity doctor”, whose saga opens a captivating window onto the scientific and medical practices of the late Renaissance. During this early attempt to bring reason to medical practice, Eamon describes in vivid detail the harsh realities of the age, chronicling a time when the next devastating plague was just a flea bite away, when corsairs roamed the Mediterranean at will, when barber surgeons bled their patients along with giving them a shave (you know that’s why barber poles are red and white, didn’t you?), and when doctors learned what they did by doing, often at their patient’s expense. The Professor of Secrets reconstructs this fascinating and frightening underworld of Renaissance science and brings to life the denizens of that lost world: alchemists tending their furnaces, craftsmen at their workbenches and surgeons daringly combatting wounds inflicted by terrifying new instruments of war all made up Fioravanti’s world. It is the story of modern science’s birth from the bottom up.