ABSTRACT
Hippolytus Guarinonius’s medical treatise Grewel situates descriptions of lazzi, or popular commedia dell’arte stage routines, within a framework of healththreatening sins and vices. This is the context in which they are examined in this chapter. Guarinonius perceived human sins as being quite literally ‘deadly’. For him, they represented potentially fatal pathways to spiritual, mental and physical breakdown, against whose symptoms it was his highest professional duty as a physician to warn his patients, as when he blames Prague’s high death rate neither on nature nor on its geographical situation, ‘but on the sloth and sinfullness of its people’, explaining that:
if some cities and places have all the good and healthy gifts and virtues of nature, but there are still plagues and other illnesses there, it is a sure sign that their inhabitants themselves have disgraced and defiled these places through one or more sins.1
