ABSTRACT
Biographical interest in papal doctors began as early as 1696, when Prospero Mandosio published his Θɛατρον, a theatre to display the doctors of the Christian pontiffs. Mandosio’s aim was to defend the dignity of medicine against its detractors. Calling on to his stage the papal doctors of the past, he sought to show that they were men of virtue and learning, and, no less important, that they came from good families. 1 Mandosio’s book was held in esteem until 1784, when a Prefect of the Vatican Archives, Gaetano Marini, was so outraged by its inaccuracies – many of Mandosio’s doctors had never served a Pope at all – that he published two bulky volumes of additions and corrections under the title Degli archiatri pontifici. With the Vatican archives at his command, Marini easily exposed the flimsy vaudeville of Mandosio’s theatre. However, he was not successful in his second aim, which was to encourage further research. Unremitting in its recital of names, dates, and sepulchral epitaphs, his book was worthy, but dull. Marini recognized as much. In its preface he offered his readers the cold comfort that, suffer as they might, at least they did not have to endure what he had gone through in the course of research: he did not know how his patience had survived so tedious and thankless a task. As for the results, what little could be said of many of the doctors was, he admitted, scarcely worth knowing, and boring to read. 2 Marini’s words undervalued his great achievement in making available a wealth of reliable information, but it cannot be denied that his book killed its subject stone dead, and two centuries of almost unbroken silence have ensued.
