ABSTRACT
183In 1547, the physician Cornelio Bianchi returned to Venice after four years in Damascus and Tripoli in the service of the Venetian consuls. Bianchi brought back two journals filled with accounts and information about his time in the Levant, one of which has survived. This chapter uses this unique document to introduce a hitherto-unexamined setting of interaction between civic physicians, local community, and the state: that of the Levantine condotte mediche. Far from being an occasional traveler to the Ottoman Empire, Bianchi was one of many physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries appointed by the Republic of Venice to its administrative outposts in the eastern Mediterranean and its consular bases in Egypt, Syria, and Constantinople in order to take care of the health of its diplomats and merchants. Bianchi’s journal shows that paper technology can do more than organize information and generate knowledge: it can also mediate practice, for the transplanted officeholder, across cultures. Bianchi’s journal was not primarily a diary of observations, but a tool to master challenges of profession and self across cultures, to negotiate carrying out public service among multiple publics, and to be a useful citizen of an ambitious republic.
