MJc.

UICAL PLURALI:-:IM JN lHE KJNGDOM üF NAPLES

condition continued to get worse. Such was the pain in her that it
his exoticism." But it does not take account of forms of healing or the
was 'as if there were a sea urchin there'.
different of disease causation of which the sick made use. The rnodel 1
Mother and beeame convinced that Onofría had put a spell on propose for the chapters that follow is one ofthree concentric and perrneabte rmgs,
Domenica women were reputed to know how to harm as well as heal), espe- labelled 'rnedical', •ecclesiastical' and 'popular'. The refer not only to the types
cial1y in view of the faet that Domeniea had had a run-in with Onofría the preví-
of healers and sourccs of hcaling, but to It allows us to
ous May. They were both part of a group of women out barley when
due where possible, to the attitudes and actions of both healers and the
Onofria had the idea ofhiding one of the sacks, The other women and did
sick. The model ís admittedly anthropologíeal; but it do es allow for historical
so, despite Domenica's opposition. When the estate factor found the hidden
ehange. Indeed, the círcles are continually shifting in relation to one another, as are
the women blarned Domenica. Domenica recalled Onofiias words to her:
the of individual healers and sources Certain kinds of charlatans,
TU make you sorry for this and 1'11 be damned if 1 won'r put a spell on you that
for move from being quasi-sacerdotal snake-charrners to secular
will have you your ' Antonia and Domenica decided to go and entrepreneurs selling famed patent remedies.
see their parish to 'heal the spell', He gave Domenica a and adviscd
thern to denounee Onofria to the bishop for acts'. Papatodero lay living saints
suggested the same course of 'since we are the doctors and not her' Thc
resuH:lJ1!gdeposition before the episcopal court is the only reason the illness episode
has come down to USo Yet it introduces many of the aspects of medical pluralism
that 1wish to explore in this book, outlining as it do es Antonia's in search-
for a cure for her daughter's the causation of which she diagnosed first
as natural and then as supernatural,
When confronted with the inevitable reality how did the people of
early modern Italy react? Of the different forms of healing available, what factors
determined which ones they turned to? In this therapeutic calculus, availability was
certainly one such factor; but we must also consider others as divcrse as the cost uf
the healers services and treatment, thcír reputation, theír suitabílíty to the disease
and its underlying causation, as well as the past of the sick themselves,
their famiIy and friends. This can be approached in different ways. In studies of
England, the 'medical market-plaee' model has tended to domínate since it was first
Medical pluralism model: healers and disease categories
used by Harold Cook. It is useful as a way ofaccounting for the range of
services available, especially in the relatively unregulated English situation. Then
In arder to the of this model, the availability of healers is
it too resernbles the health-care of the 1980s to be
perhaps the logical to start. It is certainly the most area to
uneriticalIy applied to the pase Laurenee Brock1iss and Colín Jones have chosen to
as it does with the supply side of the So, in this chapter,
focus their 'new medical history' on university medical and its influenees.
1 shall construct a therapeutic landscape of the kingdom of Naples. Thís is more
They write of a 'medica! community', of trained practitioners, and a
thanjust counting the number and surgeons and their rel-
'medical penumbra', including charlatam and The book successfully
ativc as a way of determining medical provision or, as it has been ealled,
explores nothing less than the entire 'medical world' of early modern Franee. The
medicalisation. To take account ofthe pIurality oftherapeutie resources, 1 shall con-
model use is based around relations of power. Popular fornls of are
as nluch as the data allows, all forms Thus in the medícal
considered either entirely derivative of learned ones or impossible to ascertain
this will in dude apotheearies, midwives and itinerants~ in the ecdcsiastical sphcre
beeause ofthe lack Matthew exploring a later period ofFrench
it will consider exorcists and and in the folk-medical
history, manages to find a place for folk heaIers in his model, which 1S admittedly
it will take into account the presence of cunning folk. This will enable us to sec
more economic in structure. He divides practitioners into folk healers (part of a
how the in concrete situations.
traditional physicians corporatism) and (part of
the market economy). model has the advantage ofimplying la set ofsocial
Views of the kUlgc10rn
as well as economic rclationships': the foIk heaIer being pare ofpopuIar culture, che
ph'VSIClan of values and the charla tan as the outsider, trading on Nothing in Antonía's account ofher daught(~rS illness and her response to it is typ-
 MEDICAL PLURALISM IN THE KINGDOM Of NAPLES
ícally southern Italian, Similar illness could doubtless be traced through-
out modern Europe. The inhabitants suffered from the same range OrC)VlIKe of Terra di itself very populated. Numbers tended to
of diseases as the rest Hunger and famine were permanent, 'structural' diminish the further one got from che capital, in areas viable
threats, as were recurrent and 'fevcr' (ryphus, cholera, malaria). alternatives, The province of Terra d'Otranto, with the lively city of Lecce as its
Even in the second half of the eighteenth ccntury, when plague was but a horrific capital, was thus the source of only 1.4 per cent of imrnigrants. As an important
memory, life in the kingdom was only thirty-two years -low, but little Spanish dominion, Naples attracted large numbers of immigrants from Spain (5.7
different from other rates. 7 We are used to rhe southern half of per and Sicíly, its sister dominion (5.5 per cent), However, all this
the peninsula referred ro as the 'Mezzogiorno'; but the terrn 15 not gcnerally used went uncontrolIed and no measures were taken to rcspond to it. Eventually what
to refer to a and social unit, worthy of further study. Rather it had been considered an indication of the ciry's grandeur and carne
1S used as the incarnation an obscuro problern, like to be regarded as a of the kingdom s weakness. In a complaint that echoed
sorne sharnefirl social disease. The stereotypes of a picturesque peasant folklore and around rapidly capital like London, very size w~s seen t?
Mafia bccome the 'other', or are fitted into ímprovisedjournalistie such suck the life-blood of the kingdom. Its unabated growth threatened the kingdom s
as 'Mediterranean'," This shorthand view of a baekward South offers a danzerous survival. Gaetano Pilangieri adopted a bodily rnetaphor: 'if the head grows too
distortion when interpreting realities; it is even more false much, ifall the blood rushes there and comes to a stop, the body becomes apoplec-
when applied to previous centuries. Economic underdevc10pment and tic and the entire machine falls apart and expires'c!" after Naples, no town
exploitation were features of the kingdom of Naples during rhe 'deca- managed more than twenty thousand people, even though Iike Lecce and
dence' of Spanish rule, especially in comparison with the apparcnt liberty and L'Aquila did serve important regional fimctions, It was only with the French
merchanr capitalism enjoyed by the Florence and Venice favoured by reforms at the bcginning ofthe nineteenth century that the kingdom was decentral-
Anglo-American historiography. 9 Bur these caricatures should not be allowed to ised to a and certain powers devolved to the provincial capitals. These
our exploration of other aspects of the where it shares in thc great reforrns did bring a relative decline in immigration.
thernes of modern European history as a whole. For this reason a history of The kingdom was characterised by small and medium-sized towns: close to one-
medicine and within the and in particular the characteristics of quarter of the population lived in towns of under two thousand inhabirants and
rnedical pluralisrn, is not meant to highlight peculiar to the kingdom, one-half in towns wíth populations ofbetween two thousand and seven thousand.
but reveal its typicality within modern Europe. What were conditions like? According to the statistical ofthe kingdom
In order to therapeutic pmvision as a resource, and how this resouree ordcred by Joachim Murat in I8Il, town streets were often
was a few words about population pattcrns within the kingdom ofNaples are
very narrow and tortuous, reduced to mire water used
necessary. The kingdom, primarily agricultura], was dominatcd its capital.
for domestic purposes, full of mud, stones, and into whích stables and
Cc~rv.mtes. who spent some time in Italy, has one of his refer to Naples
pens stick out, with aH their filth. The foulest and most stinking butcher's shops and
as 'the richest and 11105t de1ightfuI in aH the world'. 10 With a population rallg1ng
sla1 u g J l t e r - l l l o u s e s a r e found right in the middle ofthe street. 11l1mense sur-
around four hundrcd thousand, it was one ofEurope's cities, and one in ten
round the settled areas, where they throw the and excrement from
of the kingdom's inhabitants resided there. This number was kept up by rhe con-
the stables, and houses, but the corpses of unburicd animals as wcll. t 5
stant infiux of people trom the kingdom's twe1ve Ir he1ps to explain the
of the in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It also It was a in that these towns tended to be rather distant from one
enabled Naples to recover, albeit slowly, from the of another, by difficult terrain. The kingdom was shaped by the Apennines,
16 with three-quarters of the population living in mountainous and hílly areas.
56. Sorne estimates put the losses at half the population, and those for the
kUlg(10l11 overall at per cent, some nine hundred thousand peopIe. II Communication was very difficult, especially in those areas outside modern-day
Throughout, Naples remained the focus of polítical, and Campania and Apulia. Particularly in the case of the two Calabrian the
culturallife. It was the where most of the ended IIp Abruzzi and Basilicata, the inhabitants were dispersed in a myriad of small moun-
and the site consumption and display. People came in search ofwork, tain tOWIlS, cut off from one another, with only slightly centres. In
most in the cmwded southern part of the which included the port and the mountains of Molise, fUf 'people líve in the countryside far trom the
main market. times of dearth many more carne beca use of the food towns and the assistance of physicians. If you add to this the poor nature
pr()Vl~nOll1ng. Its dealers had first cal1 on aH the kingdom's and rhe of the the very bad nutririon and personal you will understand
authoríties at the Tribunal of San Lorenzo ser the price ofbrcad. Of pcople sct- the great infiuence poverty has on disease and the slow and difficult .
in the under one~third came fmm the surrounding towns and the Only a fifth of the population lived the coast, and most of thls was
in the capitaL

[5]
 HEALERS AND HEALlNG IN EARLY MODERN ITALY

54 dell'arte essorastica, p. 635; in Romeo, p. 138. CHAPTER TWO

A.S.N., 305e, fols 43v.-44r.; in Romeo, Inquisitori, pp. 147-8.
S6 A.S.N., 123a, fols 7v-8r; in Romeo, p. 131. The case is also dis-
cussed Jean-Michel Sallmann, Chercheurs de trésors de sorts: la quéte du sur- TH ROYAL PROTOMEDICATO
naturel ti tIU XVle siéde (París, 1986), pp. 176-8. AND PUBLIC HEALTH
57 Sallmann, et saints, p. t yz.
58 Giulio Cesare Infantino, Leca: sacra (Lecce, (634); Cesare Caracciolo,
sacra 1624).
59 lnfantino, Leae sacra p. 233. 1 cite frorn a Lecce, 1859 re-edition.
60 William Christian, in late Medieval and Renaissance Spain (Princeton,
pp. 18-20.
61 Wilhelm Gummpenberg, Atlame Mariano (Verona, 1839-47 Serafino Montorio,
Zodiaco di Maria 1715).
62 Picrroberto Scararnella, Le Madonne del Ptl~ílatorio: in Campania tra n 23 Aprill530 Charles V, two months after being crowned emperor, issued

63
rinascimento e
A.S.N.,
(Genoa,
98a, fols 12r-14r; in
p. 175.
to Romeo, P·3 13·
O an imperial to the then protophysician (protomedico) of the
KJ111g;c10rn of Naples, Narciso Verdugno. Verdugno was having difficulty enforcing
64 A.S.D.N., Miscellanea, I; discussed in Scaramella, Madonne, pp. 185- 9 0 . his powers and was granted the 'faculry to examine, and all nOI1-
65 Gianna Pomata, malatie curatori in antico and Bari,
graduate surgeons, grocers, bone-
pp. 3 10--]4.
setters, healers, midwives and any other subject and annexed persons," He was to
66 David Centilcore, From lo witch: the system of the sacred in modem Terra
be in of an office and magistracy the Protomedicato for
d'Otranto (Manchester, pp. 128-6I.
trial Lucrezia De Grosso; in Romeo, supervising the ofall forms Like other similar bodies elsewhere,
67 A.S.N.,
Inquisitori, p. 204. the activities of the Neapolitan Protomedicato were conditioned by the 'political
68 'Doctors and hcalers', p. 203. culture and the institutional and legal framework of the larger in whích
69 Acta et decreta napolltanae (Naples, p. 46 and Decreta dieces. ir opcrated, Alas, little in the way of documentation survives to indicate the actual
tanae 1568), pp. 9-10. of the protophysícian during the early modern
70 Giovanni Filippo Methodus dandi relationes pro mutilatis, torauendis aut a tortura periodo What we do know is that in r609-10 the annual collecting of dues that
excusandis, ed. G. Cureio (Catania, pp. 431-2. each practitioner had to pay the protophysician was farmed out to tax collectors.
Battista Codronchi, De motbis et (Milan, 16r8; 1St edn 1595). The From this date the protophysician was accountable te the Chamber of the
passage is discussed by Winfried Schleiner, Medica! ethus in the Renaissance (Washington, Sommaria, the kingdom's adminístrative and fiscal This shaped the
1995), pp. 9~104·
office's activities for the next two leading Giuseppe Maria Galanti to
72 Paolo Zacchia, QUa'stíones meaico-teoates (Amstcrdam, J651 edn), lib. 2, tit, 2,
remark in 1786 that its object 'seems to consist only of the collection of
13, p. 88.
anecuous p. 20.
which for the is virtually Though its impact on public
73 Piperno, De
tu«, p. 185. health was therefore rninimal, the office of the protophysícían can nevertheless tell
75 The most detailed study rernains Ernesto De Martinos La tetra del rimorso: contributo a LIS a lot about healers in modern Naples, atternpts to their activ-
una storia del Sud itíes, and thc extent to which public offices were conditioned by the state ofwhich
76 Francesco Serao, Delia tarantela o di Puglia [Naplcs, 1742). On the changing were a parto
attitudes of the medical elites towards the see Turchini, lvtorso,
morbo, I1lOrte: la tarantola cultura medica e popolare (Milan, Origins and nature of the office
pp. 47-75, and David Gentilcore, 'Ritualiscd illncss and musical therapy: views of tar-
antism in the kingdom of , in Horden l'vfusj( and medicine: the Although health and mechanisms for the day-to-day prac-
since (forthcoming).
tice of medicine ín the Italian states existed during the Middle they
77 In the seeond half of the eentury observed, par'tlc:lpa1ced
gained force in the sixteenth eentury, wíth the establishment structures,
in and described over different cases, almost aH in La Mancha. Pilar León, 'Clínical
observation and music therapy in taranrism' in Horden,
like the Protomedicati. Thcse took thrce basic forms: Spanish), coUegl~ll
1'1I1S;( atld medicillc. and nlunicipal. Due to a rdativdy strong central administratían in the kingdoms
of Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, ardinances rcgulated the l11cdical pf()fession