Description

He was called that glorious man of new miracles … an angel of paradise, sent by God to earth for the health and preservation of human life . He also was accused of being a charlatan and a dangerous quack, and he served time in prison for poisoning his patients. It was from his cell that this Renaissance surgeon issued an audacious challenge: that there be consigned to me alone twenty-five sick people…and an equal number with similar infirmities to all the physicians of Milan. If I don t cure my patients more quickly and better than they do theirs, I m willing to be banished forever from the city . Leading historian and Pulitzer-nominated author William Eamon, in his thoroughly researched narrative history, The Professor of Secrets , evokes the world of Renaissance medicine to tell the stranger-than-fiction tale of surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti. The doctor s fascinating story opens a window onto the scientific and medical world of the late Renaissance – a time when the next devastating plague was just a flea bite away. When barber surgeons frequently bled their patients along with giving them a shave. When one could buy a ticket to view a public dissection of a human body. And when doctors, according to Eamon, practiced a chemistry-kit-in-the-basement style of science. As Dava Sobel s bestselling Galileo s Daughter intimately brings to life, through letters, the world of an astronomer and his troubles with the Church, so The Professor of Secrets reconstructs a life lost to history and tells an alternative story of the Scientific Revolution – speaking through the experiences of a man who lived on the margins of great events and witnessed them with a penetrating vision. From charlatans selling their wares in the streets, to horrifying cures and treatments, to Fioravanti s miraculous contributions to medicine at the time, Eamon points up the un-romanticised realities of life during the Renaissance. And he shows us that this first celebrity physician is still relevant today, as our own modern charlatans – TV doctors and fad-diet hawkers – push upon us the next latest and greatest medicines and cures.