People
Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence
by Katharine Park
Doctors and Medicine is a social, intellectual, and institutional history of medical organization and practice in Florence during the century after the Black Death of 1348. North Italian cities like Florence were among the first to develop a well defined medical profession that ministered to the needs of both rich and poor. Emphasizing the diversity of medical practice in the city, Katharine Park discusses the institutions of guild and university, hospital and confraternity, Church and state, which shaped the medical world of the early Renaissance, and she places them in the general context of Florentine civic life and culture.
The book also focuses on the doctors themselves, describing their social position and their intellectual life, including their participation in the scientific, literary, and artistic culture of the Florentine Renaissance. Park argues that the advent of plague marked a crisis in the life of the medical profession, transforming its composition and the conditions of medical practice.
Contact
- Email: park28@fas.harvard.edu
- Phone: (617) 495-9922
Classes
- HS 112: Health, Medicine, and Healing in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
- HS 200: Research Methods in the History of Science
- HS 212: The Sciences of Life, Medicine and the Body in Medieval Renaissance Europe
- HS 215: Science and Culture in Late Medieval and Renaissance Europe: Seminar
- Historical Study B-24: Utopia in the Age of the Scientific Revolution
Books & Publications
- Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985
- (with Lorraine J. Daston), Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, New York: Zone Books, 1998
- Secrets of Women - Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection
- (with Lorraine J. Daston, co-editor), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006
- Italian translation: Le meraviglie del mondo. Mostri, prodigi e fatti strani dal Medioevo all’Illuminismo, Rome: Carocci, 2000.
- German translation: Wunder und die Ordnung der Natur, 1150-1750, trans. S. Wohlfeil and Ch. Krueger, Frankfurt: Eichborn, 2002.
