ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to sketch the outlines of specialized surgical practice in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence, supplemented by material collected by other scholars for other Italian cities. It argues that surgical specialists constituted a sizeable, well-established and relatively well-defined group of medical practitioners, clearly distinguished from both general surgeons and barber-surgeons, and from itinerant sellers of charms and nostrums. The evidence from the catasto confirms the standard view of the empirical surgeon as an artisanally trained specialist. Surgical specialists might also come from native Florentine families of some standing; the poultice doctor Maestro Zanobi di Iacopo Mangani qualified as eligible for the priorate in the scrutiny of 1382 and was captain of the prestigious Parte Guelfa at his death in that same year. Empirical surgeons had little in common with the itinerant pedlars of nostrums known most commonly in the fifteenth century as cerretani.
