If, in this atmosphere of superstition beneath and liberalism above, science made only modest advances in the two centuries before Vesalius (1514–64), it was largely because patronage and honor went to art, scholarship, and poetry, and there was as yet no clear call, in the economic or intellectual life of Italy, for scientific methods and ideas. A man like Leonardo could take a sweeping cosmic view, and touch a dozen sciences with eager curiosity; but there were no great laboratories, dissection was only beginning, no miscroscope could help biology or medicine, no telescope could yet enlarge the stars and bring the moon to the edge of the earth. The medieval love of beauty had matured into magnificent art; but there had been little medieval love of truth to grow into science; and the recovery of ancient literature stimulated a skeptical epicureanism idealizing antiquity rather than a stoic devotion to scientific research aiming to mold the future. The Renaissance gave its soul to art, leaving a little for literature, less for philosophy, least for science. In this sense it lacked the multiform mental activity of the Greek heyday from Pericles and Aeschylus to Zeno the Stoic and Aristarchus the astronomer. Science could not advance until philosophy had cleared the way.
Therefore it is natural that the same reader who knows by name a dozen Renaissance artists will find it hard to recall one Renaissance Italian scientist, barring Leonardo; even of Amerigo Vespucci he will have to be reminded; and Galileo (1564–1642) belongs to the seventeenth century. In truth there were no memorable names except in geography and medicine. Oderic of Pordenone went to India and China as a missionary (c. 1321), returned via Tibet and Persia, and wrote an account of what he had seen, adding much of value to what Marco Polo had reported a generation before. Paolo Toscanelli, astronomer, physician, and geographer, noted Halley’s comet in 1456, and is reputed to have given Columbus knowledge and encouragement for his Atlantic venture.16g Amerigo Vespucci of Florence made four voyages to the New World (1497f), claimed to have been the first to discover the mainland, and prepared maps of it; Martin Waldseemüller, publishing them, suggested that the continent be called America; the Italians liked the idea, and popularized it in their writings.16h
The biological sciences were the last to develop, for the theory of the special creation of man—almost universally accepted—made it unnecessary and dangerous to inquire into his natural origin. For the most part these sciences limited themselves to practical pursuits and studies in medical botany, horticulture, floriculture, and agriculture. Pietro de’ Crescenzi, at the age of seventy-six (1306), published Ruralia commoda, an admirable manual of agriculture, except that it ignored the still better writings of Spanish Moslems in this field. Lorenzo de’ Medici had kept a semipublic garden of rare plants at Careggi; the first public botanical garden was founded by Luca Ghini at Pisa in 1544. Almost all rulers of style had zoological gardens; and Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici kept a human menagerie—a collection of barbarians of twenty different nationalities, all of splendid physique.
III. MEDICINE
The most prosperous science was medicine, for men will sacrifice anything but appetite for health. Physicians received a stimulating share of Italy’s new wealth. Padua paid one of them two thousand ducats a year to serve as consultant, while leaving him free to charge for his private practice.16i Petrarch, standing on his benefices, indignantly denounced the high fees of physicians, their robes of scarlet and their miniver hoods,16j their sparkling rings and golden spurs. He earnestly warned the sick Pope Clement VI against trusting physicians:
I know that your bedside is beleaguered by doctors, and naturally this fills me with fear. Their opinions are always conflicting, and he who has nothing new to say suffers the shame of limping behind the others. As Pliny said, in order to make a name for themselves through some novelty, they traffic with our lives. With them—not as with other trades—it is sufficient to be called a physician to be believed to the last word, and yet a physician’s lie harbors more danger than any other. Only sweet hope causes us not to think of the situation. They learn their art at our expense, and even our death brings them experience; the physician alone has the right to kill with impunity. Oh, Most Gentle Father, look upon their band as an army of enemies. Remember the warning epitaph which an unfortunate man had inscribed on his tombstone: “I died of too many physicians.”17
In all civilized lands and times physicians have rivaled women for the distinction of being the most desirable and satirized of mankind.
The basis of progress in medicine was the renaissance of anatomy. Ecclesiastics, co-operating with physicians as well as with artists, sometimes provided corpses for dissection from the hospitals that they controlled. Mondino de’ Luzzi dissected cadavers at Bologna, and wrote an Anatomia (1316) which remained a classic text for three centuries. Nevertheless corpses were hard to get. In 1319 some medical students at Bologna stole a corpse from a cemetery and brought it to a teacher at the University, who dissected it for their instruction. The students were prosecuted but acquitted, and from that time the civil authorities winked an eye at the use of executed and unclaimed criminals in “anatomies.”18 Berengario da Carpi (1470–1550), professor of anatomy at Bologna, was credited with having dissected over a hundred corpses.19 Dissection was practised at the University of Pisa at least as early as 1341; soon it was permitted in all the medical schools of Italy, including the papal school of medicine in Rome. Sixtus IV (1471–84) officially authorized such dissections.20
Slowly Renaissance anatomy regained its forgotten classic heritage. Men like Antonio Benivieni, Alessandro Achillini, Alessandro Benedetti, and Marcantonio della Torre liberated anatomy from Arabic tutelage, went back to Galen and Hippocrates, questioned even these sacred authorities, and added, nerve by nerve, muscle by muscle, and bone by bone, to the scientific knowledge of the body. Benivieni directed his anatomies to finding the internal causes of disease; his treatise On Several Hidden and Wonderful Causes of Disease and Cures (De abditis nonnullis ac mirandis morborum et sanationum causes 1507) founded pathological anatomy, and made post-mortem examinations a main factor in the development of modern medicine. Meanwhile the new art of printing accelerated medical progress by facilitating the diffusion and international exchange of medical texts.