ABSTRACT

This chapter documents and explores the intellectual consequences of an important feature of early modern medical practice: the strong ties that bound physicians to a specific place because of their contractual agreement to serve a community as civic doctors. Among these consequences, it is argued, was a new significance of place in civic doctors’ case records and in their understanding of disease. Examining physicians’ attention to local conditions in the case literature of this period reveals the emergence of a less individualistic and more population-oriented notion of disease. This new orientation appears to be related to the fact that the authors of case literature often worked as town physicians, with strong ties to a specific locality. The chapter examines in detail the significance of place in the medical work of Epifanio Ferdinando the Elder, a civic doctor of seventeenth-century Mesagne, a small town in Southern Italy. Ferdinando’s writings on tarantism exemplify an early modern trend of associating a specific disease with a specific place and culture.