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Abstract
This dissertation examines the contributions of apothecary craftsmen and their medicinal retailing practices to emerging cultures of scientific investigation and experimental practice in the Italian port city of Venice between 1565 and 1730. During this important period in Europe’s history, efforts to ground traditional philosophical investigations of nature in a new material culture of empirical and experimental practice elicited significant debate in scholarly communities. Leading the way in advancing the authority of “experience” were Europe’s medical practitioners divided between university-trained physicians and guild-regulated apothecaries and surgeons. In Italy, humanist praise for the practical arts and new techniques of analyzing inherited texts influenced sixteenth-century university physicians to redefine the medical discipline in terms of its practical aims to intervene in nature and achieve useful effects.
The unique intellectual climate at Padua has thus attracted significant scholarly attention in the history and philosophy of early modern science. However, the university’s important relationships with the thriving world of artisan guilds and their commercial practices in the nearby city of Venice have not received due attention in historical scholarship. To address this issue, this dissertation focuses upon a unique group of guild-trained medical practitioners in Venice – apothecaries – to trace the circulations of materials, skills, and expertise between Padua and the Venetian marketplace. Drawing on the methods of urban history, medical anthropology, literary studies and intellectual history, I conceptualize Venice as an important “contact zone,” or space of dialogue between scholarly and artisanal modes of investigating and representing nature between the latter sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. In particular, I focus upon emerging apothecary strategies for retailing nature to public audiences through their medicinal creations, printed books, licensing petitions, and their pharmacy shops. Looking to a wide variety of statements on the urban pharmacy in Venice in published medical books, pharmacopeias, trade manuals, literary works, civic rituals and archival licensing and regulatory decrees, I trace the evolution of the public apothecary trade in Venice, paying particular attention to the pharmacy’s early modern materialization as a site of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the artisan workshop and the university world inhabited by scholars.
My readings of these sources lead to three important conclusions regarding the significance of apothecary retailing to the scientific culture of early modern Italy. First, the urban terrain of artisan practice in a merchant republic must be placed alongside the traditionally studied princely courts and universities as a fertile ground for dialogue between artisans and scholars in the study of nature. Second, apothecary investments in processing and retailing nature during this period made significant contributions to the material culture of early modern science in both mediating a growing pharmacopeia of exotic materials imported from around the globe, and in fashioning workshop models for the first university chemical laboratories instituted at Padua in the eighteenth century. And third, apothecary marketing strategies expressing their own medical expertise over nature’s materials articulated a fusion of textual learning and manual skill that offered some of the earliest profiles of the experimental practitioner that was eventually adopted in the public discourse of the experimental New Sciences by the latter seventeenth century. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
