Introduction

In 1504, the Veronese physician Gabriele Zerbi, self-proclaimed expert on retarding the aging process, responded to a summons-and the promise of a sizable rewardto cure the elderly, ailing Turkish leader Skander Pasha in Bosnia. It was widely known that the Pasha liked to indulge his appetites, both gustatory and sexual, to degrees that were at odds with the lessons of Western medical science on bodily preservation. Zerbi himself had counseled moderation in most things, abstention in others, in his handbook on the problems of old age, Gerontocomia (1489), and he could cite authorities from Aristotle to classical humoral theory to bolster his opinions. As the human body aged, the prevailing belief went, it became colder and dryer. This slowly debilitating process could never be arrested-after all, God had set limits to man’s average life span, whether the 120 years proclaimed in Genesis 6:3 or the “fourscore” of Psalms 90:10-but it might be slowed if one followed the proper regimen. For example, eating too much resulted in a “density” of food in the stomach, a dangerous condition because “the old man who has little heat in him cannot change the dense food into nourishment.”1 Wine drunk in moderation was salutary because it increased “innate heat” and partly compensated for natural thermal loss; on the other hand, excessive drinking could be deadly, threatening the “ultimate frigidity,” just as adding too much oil to a lantern extinguishes it.2 A similar humoral justification underlies chapter 48 of the handbook, “Permission and Prohibition of Sex in the Resumptive Regimen.” Less permissive and more prohibitory, it begins, “Sex should simply be avoided by old men” because every emission of semen represents an irretrievable diminution of heat and moisture.3 For those, however, who simply cannot restrain themselves, Zerbi recommends certain precautions: for example, sex is always safer in autumn than it is in summer, daylight is preferable to nighttime, and one should never stay awake too long after the act. Finally, he acknowledges that sexual desire remains

1 Gabriele Zerbi, “Gerontocomia: On the Care of the Aged,” in Gabriele Zerbi, “Gerontocomia: On the Care of the Aged” and Maximianus, “Elegies on Old Age and Love”, trans. L. R. Lind (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1988), p. 120.