ABSTRACT
Petrarch’s Invectives against the Doctor is most certainly an archetypical Renaissance confrontation of rhetoric and medicine, as well as a primitive encounter of Humanism and science, or at least pseudo-science. It is possible to perform a rhetorical analysis which is simply an account of the rhetorical techniques employed, the figures and the arguments of what is, after all, a rhetorical tour-de-force. A Peircian rhetorical analysis discloses Petrarch’s invective as itself a rhetorical analysis of medical investigative practice, an analysis which concerns itself primarily with the practical effects of words and signs. Petrarch insisted in both the Invectives and the late letters that his object was not medicine in general but a doctor or doctors; the particular antagonist in the Invectives was a physician who had responded angrily to his letter to Clement VI warning him against the crowd of physicians besieging him in his illness.
