ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a picture of the social and political stratification of late sixteenth-century Bologna, the relationships among different kinds of men, and the culture of duel and the practices of violence in the Papal state. It also describes what it was like to be a learned surgeon in sixteenth-century Italy and argues that the emergence of a textual representation of facial surgery is linked to the great prestige that surgery and surgeons enjoyed at that studio. Camillo Baldi’s description gives the modern reader a glimpse of the social tensions that could interfere in the doctor-patient relationship, especially for a procedure like facial reconstructive surgery. In cities like Bologna and Padua, the double character of learned surgery could attract middle-class students of medicine wanting to establish their name. A historical use of the tool of gender and masculinity is most useful to understand the rise of reconstructive surgery.
