ABSTRACT
135This chapter draws on the archives of Milan, especially its board of health, to identify eight specific forms and functions of public writing that flourished as two rising learned groups, physicians and jurists, became increasingly involved in government in Europe. In reading disease notifications (avvisi) and writing reports (ragguagli), plans, and instructions, civic physicians operated in a system with jurists, senators, administrators, and citizen observers and thereby on bodies, behavior, and environment. Before modern norms of officeholding, more than premodern ideals of civic virtue, formalized writing defined behaviors of knowledgeable government and of the common good beyond interests—and the proclaimed disinterestedness—of patriciate and professions from which high officeholders came. This schooled physicians like Alessandro Tadino (1580–1661) and Lodovico Settala (1550–1633) in judging collectively with non-physicians, unlike doctors submitting consilia to courts or council. Interdependent empiricism and action opened up medicine’s corporative and learned ways. Publications show a mixture of scholarly and administrative genre, as in Settala and Tadino’s Avertenze et osservationi on the composition of drugs; and novel use of genre, as in Tadino’s plague treatise as ragguaglio. Practice and its failures in Milan exemplify neither reform nor state-building, but a growing system of informed writing for health.
