Recording medical recipes: Surgeons and barbers in early modern Italy (c. 1450–1600)

Abstract

The early modern period witnessed a notable rise in publications dedicated to learned surgery, yet manuscript evidence of surgeons’ day-to-day practice remains scarce. The five manuscripts examined here offer fresh insight into the practice-based activities of Italian surgeons between roughly 1450 and 1600, highlighting an understudied aspect of their work: the recording of recipes and use of medications. After discussing the practical functions and tentative categorization of these surgical manuscripts, the essay explores the centrality of recipe collection as both a tool of practice and a medium for medical theory. It also analyses the types, forms, and purposes of remedies recorded, the epistemic domains they reflect, and their connections to contemporary pharmaceutical literature. Finally, the manuscripts’ linguistic features reveal important clues about the sociocultural status of surgical practitioners. What emerges from the analysis is the centrality of pharmaceutical knowledge in surgical expertise and a variegated picture of early modern surgical practice, shedding light on actual knowledge-in-use across a diverse range of practitioners.