ABSTRACT
At times, the old men of Cinquecento Venetian drama seem to want nothing more than to challenge all the humorally based prohibitions medical science urged upon the elderly.1 The Catalonian physician Arnaldus of Villanova (c.1240-1311) oversaw the composition of the era’s most popular and enduring handbooks on the subject of hygiene for the aged, the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum. Northern Italians were able to consult its major tenets in the 1549 Italian translation Opera utilissima di Arnaldo di Villa Nuova di conservare la sanita, published in Venice. Its admonitions had for centuries been handed down faithfully across Europe: “It is known that the entire focus in the maintenance of the old consists in administering things that warm and moisten,” that is, treatments beneficial for the blood, the bodily humor possessing hot and moist qualities.2 Such measures included drinking wine in moderation, being massaged (fricatione), and eating warm, moist foods. Conversely, the old “should avoid all foods that generate phlegm and melancholy.”3 Exercise should also be eschewed, “for the bodies of the old are in decline, on account of which there is no hope that exercise may fortify their weak limbs” (le membra loro deboli).4 Moving from le membra to il membro, Arnaldus decrees that sex, while offering significant digestive benefits, should nonetheless be considered a “mortal enemy” to men possessing “dry members”—and dryness, again, correlated inescapably with advanced age.5
