ABSTRACT
Giovanni Catelano died in 1497, five hundred years ago. In medical circles he was known well only in Milan, but there he was prominent enough that advisers could beg Duke Ludovico Sforza to pay a visit to him before he died. Through his involvement in civic projects advanced by Ludovico's father, the great Renaissance warlord Francesco Sforza, Catelano allied his training in medicine with the interests of early modern state building. Giovanni Catelano's name appears in 1452, linked to the first three cases of the earliest surviving register of the Milanese Necrologi. A fierce and costly plague was ending, but the death registers stalwartly recorded details of each new plague death. Catelano probably arrived in Milan at the time Francesco Sforza seized control, for his name is first recorded in 1450 as a 'foreign' member of the prestigious College of Physicians.
