Fioravanti: Pioneering Surgeon-Alchemist of the Renaissance

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He was called a Charlatan, a Poisoner, a Reformer, a Knight, a Prophet, a Miracle-Worker, a Saviour, an Alchemist, and a Fraud. He probably dropped out of university, if he attended at all, and yet he became a doctor at the court of Philip II of Spain and one of history’s first medical celebrities, thanks to the ‘miraculous printing press’, as he called it. He challenged physicians everywhere – literally, I’ll tell you the story of a medical duel in a bit – and he was jailed, accused of poisoning his patients. The Bolognese surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti (1517-1588) was very famous in the 16th century and beyond, but he has largely been forgotten by history. Yet his story, from his medical secrets to his flamboyant writing style and his recipe for the philosopher’s stone, tells us a lot about how medicine was practised in the Renaissance. And in many ways, his style of healing pointed the way to modern medicine. So, let’s uncover the tale of one of the most famous, or infamous, depending on your perspective, characters in the Italian Renaissance that you probably never heard of, and let’s untangle the strands of early modern medicine.

What is ‘Good’ Medicine? (From Bologna to Sicily)

It’s always helpful to historians when people decide to write their autobiography and tell us all kinds of details about their lives. Yet, in Fioravanti’s case, we have to take everything he wrote with a grain of salt. He was known, even in the 16th century, to exaggerate his tales. But he wasn’t the only one to think highly of his talents. The Venetian poet Dionigi Atanagi (1504-1573) called him ‘an angel of paradise, sent by God to earth for the health and preservation of human life’ after Atanagi had been ‘miraculously’ healed of a gunshot wound by the surgeon. Fioravanti had plenty of admirers. To many of his patients, he was a saviour, a prophet, who ushered in a new age in medicine. But he was also abrasive; he made enemies everywhere he went, especially among the physicians. To his competitors in an overcrowded medical marketplace, where physicians, surgeons and empirics competed for patients, he was ridiculous at best and dangerous at worst; a quack, a fraud.

In any case, Fioravanti knew how to pique his readers’ interest. In his autobiographical book, Il Tesoro della vita Humana, the treasury of human life, Fioravanti skips the first decades of his life completely.

The story really begins when, at 30 years old, he embarks on a journey for knowledge, in which he would seek medical secrets and learn by experience as an empirical healer:

Already you get a sense of how clever he was with his marketing. And yes, I know it’s an anachronistic term, but still. He is writing for a general audience, not for specialists. And he wants you, the reader, to know that he respects you, too. He has learned from all kinds of sources, even ‘simple women’, believe it or not!

So, in 1548, at 30 years old, Fioravanti leaves Bologna, where he probably attended some classes at the university before dropping out and very likely becoming an apprentice to a surgeon. He goes to Sicily, which had a long medical tradition, in search of the ‘secrets of nature’. Specifically, Fioravanti is searching for an idealised, ‘natural’ or ‘primitive’ medicine, in his words, which he believes has survived in the countryside, among peasants, shepherds, and wise women – the ‘first physicians’, who ‘knew no medical system, nor any method at all, but had good judgement.’ Of course, at the time, disease was everywhere, it was inescapable but it was also arbitrary. Epidemics, such as the many kinds of plague, periodically appeared and coexisted with everyday ailments, such as wounds caused by accidents or skin rashes. Some diseases, such as leprosy, were believed to be a divine punishment. Syphilis and typhus could also be attributed to sinful behaviour. So, medical knowledge coexisted with this theological framework of disease – not to mention other factors, such as corrupt air or astrology. And, as they spread, these aggressive diseases weren’t responding to the treatments offered by university-trained physicians and their remedies based on balancing the humours. For someone like Fioravanti, it was time to go back, to the ‘true’ medicine that had been developed by the first physicians, largely by observing the healing ways of animals in nature. This medicine had been lost, according to Fioravanti; it had been corrupted by the humoral theory, ‘the great lie’ of physicians. Fioravanti saw the medicine taught at universities as focusing on the causes of illness; physicians valued theory over practice; they focused on why the body was healthy or not. And they usually relied on ancient authorities, such as Galen, and the humoral theory. By balancing the humours, the body could be restored to health. Besides that, physicians relied on regulating the non-naturals – such as diet, sleep, and exercise, largely through regimens.

People like Fioravanti, however, were not as interested in the causes behind illness as they were on the ways they could treat patients. As long as a remedy worked, it was good. So, he started learning about distillation and the ‘old ways’, rethinking medicine by mixing knowledge from different traditions. In Messina, for instance, Fioravanti learnt three remedies to treat wounds from a local surgeon, which would later make him famous. In his writings, there are plenty of cases when physicians are baffled by a case,

So, Fioravanti starts practising in Sicily, and his cures earn him the nickname ‘new Asclepius’, after the Greek god of medicine. Most importantly, he develops the conviction that the ‘natural ways’ of healing, this ‘medical primitivism’ that he found in Southern Italy, was superior to what university physicians prescribed, especially in their regimens. And this is something that he believes for the rest of his life. The reason for that was that medical knowledge should be gained by observation and experience. He later wrote:

Experimentation and Alchemy (Naples)

Fioravanti didn’t stay in Sicily for long. He travelled to Naples, and with good reason. He had heard of two surgeons, the brothers Paolo and Pietri Vianeo, who knew a new method of repairing mutilated noses, a kind of ‘proto-rhinoplasty’. This was a useful skill, especially during times of war, but also because, with the spread of syphilis and ‘syphilitic noses’, there would definitely be a market for a surgeon who mastered this kind of operation. So this was one of the secrets to learn on this trip. But there was more. In Naples, there was a thriving culture of experimentation and lots of alchemists. Remember, although magic in different forms has existed for millennia, it was truly reborn in the Renaissance, in no small measure because of the translation of alchemical texts from Arabic and Greek into Latin. 

In 1466, Marsilio Ficino, a Neoplatonist scholar who had also studied medicine, came across a manuscript in Greek, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, or three-times great Hermes. (I promise this is a short tangent.) These hermetic books – ‘hermetic’ coming from Hermes – claimed to contain ancient Egyptian magic. Ficino translated this manuscript, and hermeticism truly flourished in this period. The main reason for that is probably the promise that, by manipulating nature through alchemy, by understanding the ‘secrets of nature’, magic could produce ‘wonders’, including remedies and elixirs to treat disease and prolong health. And that’s where Fioravanti enters the story.

His fascination with taking medicine out of the hands of university-trained physicians who, he believed, knew theory but lacked practical knowledge, was heavily influenced by the idea that, through experimentation, nature could reveal her secrets, from how to turn base metals into gold – the great pursuit of alchemists – to how to cure illness. And Naples was the place to be. Much of what later came to be known as the ‘Scientific Revolution’ had its origins in ‘natural magic’ and alchemy, with their focus on experimentation, observation, and trial and error. There were many academies in Naples – including ‘academies of secrets’ – where recipes could be perfected. And those included cosmetic and medical recipes, too. This kind of haphazard Renaissance experimentation, guided basically by curiosity, is not the kind that people usually think of when they think of the scientific revolution. But, without experimenters like Fioravanti, our idea of 16th-century science and medicine would be incomplete. And they did epitomise what is arguably the most novel aspect of science at the time, the focus on practical experience over book learning.

In Naples, Fioravanti was immersed in the world of alchemy and its methods, especially distillation. Alchemical medicine was growing in popularity, and so Fioravanti realised how fashionable alchemical remedies, such as distillates, could make him successful. For instance, let’s consider the Philosopher’s Stone. There were many well-known alchemists during the Renaissance, following the tradition of Ramon Llull (1232-1315) and Arnald de Villanova (1240-1311).  Llull’s writings about an elixir opposing purity and corruption were influential for people like Fioravanti because it gave them an alchemical framework to understand health and illness. Fioravanti started to think that disease was the result of corrupt matter inside the body, especially in the stomach, which had to be expelled so that the body could be restored to ‘pristine health’.

One of the alchemists’ main pursuits was the ‘philosopher’s stone’, which was believed to be capable of transmuting base metals into gold. But it could also allegedly cure all illnesses, acting like a panacea, and prolonging life. And this wasn’t a quest just for the literati anymore, but for all kinds of experimenters. Because Fioravanti didn’t believe in the humoral theory – and the idea that remedies had to be adapted to each person’s individual constitution – a universal remedy seemed possible. Fioravanti even published a recipe for the philosopher’s stone in his books. It’s not that he claimed to be able to turn lead into gold, but that his elixir could transform the body, bringing it back to health. Influenced by the idea of corruption and purgation, his philosopher’s stone – which could be used by itself or as an ingredient in other recipes, to make a herbal mixture more powerful – provoked vomiting, using Roman vitriol and mercury. In a genius move, he used the philosopher’s stone – pietra filosofale – as a tradename for a remedy, so that people would want to buy it. Or, if not, they could buy his books and, if they knew anything about distillation – which many people did at this time – they could make their own philosopher’s stone at home.

This new, reformed medicine was based on remedies that were much more aggressive than those usually prescribed by physicians, which he found ‘too delicate’. The ‘indispositions’ in the stomach needed to be violently purged, according to him, through diarrhoea and/or vomiting. Expelling this bodily corruption would require alchemical remedies. And this is why we shouldn’t dismiss people like Fioravanti from conversations about alchemical medicine. Yes, of course, we need to talk about Paracelsus (c. 1493-1541), who was highly influential in changing medicine, especially in Northern Europe. But this ‘Southern style’ of alchemy, if we can call it that, based on an earlier tradition of distilling quintessences to create ‘pure’ medicines was a big part of the story, too.

But I digress. In this period, Fioravanti managed to become a doctor to the son of the Spanish viceroy and to serve as a military surgeon in the African wars, against the Turkish corsairs in the Mediterranean. His knowledge of how to treat wounds came in handy, for sure. But, as always, wars allow surgeons ample room to practice, and to learn.

A Popular Healer (Rome)

Always on the move, we soon find Fioravanti in Rome. He already had a somewhat controversial reputation by then, mainly because, everywhere he went, he clashed against the medical establishment. His conflicts with doctors about how to practice medicine were not the only problem, though. By then, he had started ‘selling secrets’, medical recipes. People could buy these recipes from him and take them to an apothecary to prepare or make the remedy themselves at home. These included elixirs like the philosopher’s stone, his gunshot wound formulas, and even a miraculous oil to treat womb-related problems. 

In Rome, Fioravanti tells us in his writings, he was a ‘miraculous’ healer who was successful in treating what the physicians believed to be lost causes. But there’s more to the story. Fioravanti hadn’t applied for a license to practise as a surgeon, as he should have. And he was still building his reputation there. But luckily for him, the Venetian ambassador’s groom was injured in a fight, and no surgeon had been able to treat him. Until Fioravanti, who had just come back from treating wounds in the war, and was able to successfully treat the man. This is how he described the aftermath:

Fioravanti wanted publicity, and he got it. And his story tells us a lot about the early modern medical marketplace. Just like today, lots of medical practitioners were competing for patients’ attention – and money. Physicians were up against surgeons, barber-surgeons, midwives, herb women, itinerant healers and empirics, plus charlatans. Many of these categories overlapped but also, some of these terms were broadly defined. For instance, when we think of a charlatan today, we think of someone who is a fraud, who misleads others, which is how historians of medicine described them for a long time. But that wasn’t how someone in 16th-century Rome would have understood the term ciarlatano. They were often licensed to sell their formulas and they operated legally. A charlatan was usually someone who mounted a portable stall and sold remedies and cosmetics at the piazza, using catchy trade names for their products and combining theatrical elements to create stage personas, sometimes singing to promote their medicines. Their products tended to sell well – maybe because of a mix of the charlatan’s charm, but also, because there was a growing dissatisfaction with traditional medicine after several epidemics and the spread of syphilis, both of which physicians hadn’t been very successful in treating. So, there was a new interest in novelty, and elixirs that promised ‘miraculous’ cures. And, of course, to be fair to these charlatans some of their products did work, such as herbal drinks containing fenugreek for wet nurses or breastfeeding mothers to produce more milk. Still, although charlatans were ubiquitous in this period, they were often criticised.

You can feel this ambivalence in the writing of an English traveller, Fynes Moryson (1566-1630):

That says it all. Also, opposing the medical establishment at every turn made Fioravanti a symbol of the Renaissance charlatan. Of course, Fioravanti told readers how all conflicts were caused by the envy ‘malicious physicians’ felt towards him.

Although Fioravanti wasn’t setting up a stall at the piazza, he had much in common with charlatans, especially his theatricality and the way he marketed his new drugs. As for how his remedies worked, for many conditions, it’s possible that his aggressive formulas made people feel better, at least in the short term. By violently purging the body, patients could feel that something was happening – and the ‘corrupt’ matter that was expelled were proof that there was something inside the body that needed to come out. Fioravanti wasn’t the only medical reformer at the time to be using these strategies. Tommaso Bovio of Verona (1521-1609), for instance, also used these expulsive drugs, and was also very popular.

But there’s another kind of weird comparison that could be made here. These dramatic remedies that had such an extreme effect on the body were particularly popular in the second half of the 16th century, during the Catholic Reformation, when exorcisms were being more frequently performed than before. And exorcisms often involved administering potent drugs to physically expel demons from the body – by vomiting and diarrhoea. Maybe, this theatrical way of ridding the body of evil – whether a spiritual or a physical evil – indicates some overlap between religious and medical practices. Hellebore, for instance, was used both by exorcists as an antimalefic agent and by Fioravanti to purge the body. Coming back to charlatans, they also explored this theatrical side in the way they sold their products. In a way, Fioravanti described his healing methods as kind of a ‘physiological exorcism’; he didn’t just heal patients, he ‘saved’ them. So, to build his persona, he appropriated lots of different identities, from the countryside peasants to charlatans, and even exorcists.  

Still, Fioravanti also felt the pressure to compete against other medical practitioners. In the same way he was criticised by physicians, perhaps surprisingly, he denounced anatomists. For context, medical students in his native Bologna would have watched human dissection at the university from the beginning of the 14th century. But, as this practice spread in the 16th century, especially thanks to his contemporary Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), Fioravanti and many others wrote against it. He called it a ‘pitiless and cruel’ practice, closer to the butcher’s trade than medicine. Fioravanti wrote that it was ‘a delightful art, good to know how to talk about in the company of others’, but warned against anatomy becoming too central to medicine. His disgust and hostility probably had much to do with the competitive nature of the medical marketplace, though. Surgery had long been taught by apprenticeship, but it had risen from a craft to become a part of the medical curriculum at universities. Maybe this was why he protested the way anatomists, rivals to surgeons, were taking over.

That’s the thing with Fioravanti: he was always savvy in terms of how to sell his products – and himself. During his time in Rome, he became a medical ‘businessman’ of sorts. I’ll embrace the anachronism and say that he started a mail-order business, because that’s what it was. Patients would write letters to him, and he would write back, for a fee, including recipes and instructions on how to prepare the remedy. This was a clever strategy and, although consulting doctors by correspondence became commonplace a few centuries later, it was a novel idea in Fioravanti’s day. When he started writing books later on, he used many of the letters he received from patients as a way to bolster his reputation:

At the same time, Fioravanti was making sure that his remedies had catchy names: mightly elixir (magno elixir), blessed oil (oleo benedetto), aromatic goddess (dia aromatica), Leonardo’s grand liquor (magno licore Leonardi), angelic electuary (elettuario angelico). He was popular, for sure, but his disdain for the medical establishment and the sheer violence of his treatments meant that soon he was accused by physicians of killing his patients instead of healing them. Fioravanti attributed that to envy, and decided it was time to leave. He was an iconoclast; he wanted to reform medicine, but he also wanted to become famous in the process. And maybe Venice, the capital of print at the time, was the way to go; through publishing his works he would make sure his name entered history. Or so he thought. And so, to Venice he went.

Medicine and the Printing Revolution (Venice)

Venice in the 16th century was bubbling with activity. It was a rich and powerful city, and it acted as a crossroads in commerce. There was little you couldn’t buy at Piazza San Marco. Perfumes from Arabia, Indian spices, new and ‘exotic’ plants from the New World, lapis lazuli from Persia, you name it. Many of these products were used in medical and cosmetic recipes and, just to give you an idea, Venice had over 70 apothecary shops, and Fioravanti soon became acquainted with over a dozen pharmacists who produced and sold his medicines. Keep in mind that besides anatomical theatres at universities, and alchemical workshops in aristocratic households, there were few of what we would call ‘scientific laboratories’ until the following century. Much research and experimentation happened in people’s homes, often in the kitchen, but also at academies – including Fioravanti’s Academy of Secrets in Naples that I mentioned earlier – craftsmen’s workshops and, you guessed it, pharmacies. And that makes sense. Apothecaries needed to know how to prepare remedies, and that often meant knowing a little bit of alchemy and definitely about distillation. So a Venice pharmacy would be a place where people like Fioravanti would gather, test recipes, and essentially create new knowledge. Doctors saw patients in pharmacies, too.

But there was another reason why Venice was the natural next step for Fioravanti: it had a thriving print culture. The printing press is deeply connected to many big changes that happened in this period, from religious reform to humanism and what we would later call the Scientific Revolution.

Fioravanti was well aware of how powerful the printing press was, as you can tell by his writings.

Fioravanti was onto something. Like pharmacies, printers’ workshops were centres of knowledge production and innovation. In terms of medicine, medical knowledge from different cultures mixed in Venice; those who shared it through print in an accessible way could become highly successful. Plus, since the 1550s, medical ‘self-help’ books, if we can call them that, had become best-sellers. They mostly contained recipes to produce remedies – but also lots of other things, from hair dye to invisible ink for secret letters. And the most successful of these books were the ones penned by a certain Don Alessio Piemontese, who was very likely a pseudonym, an editorial invention, created by a man called Girolamo Ruscelli (1518-1566). And, very conveniently, Fioravanti was close friends with Ruscelli. They had met in Naples through their shared interest in alchemy. In any case, Ruscelli was working as a poligrafo, a tradesman of the pen, similar to an editor, at a printing house. He introduced Fioravanti around, and soon he was working as an editor too, before publishing his own works. He added a short text on surgery on the first book he edited, and managed to recommend his own remedies throughout it, and to mention his forthcoming book. This just goes to show how interconnected the worlds of medicine and print were at the time.  There was even a name for the kind of writer that Fioravanti became, which was also exemplified by Alessio Piemontese: a ‘professor of secrets’. 

The first one to categorise them had been a friar, Tommaso Garzoni, in a book describing ‘all the professions of the world’. Garzoni described these people as experimenters, who collected ‘secrets’, recipes ‘that they desire more than any of life’s daily needs’. But they did more than collect; they wrote down and published these secrets or recipes; they ‘professed’ them for everyone to hear. There was a big debate at the time about the ethics of knowledge, about who should have access to certain kinds of knowledge – such as alchemy and medicine. For people like Fioravanti, however, the printing press, the possibility of writing in the vernacular instead of in Latin, the growing literacy rates, and the popularity of cheaply printed books allowed him to market his remedies to an even bigger public. And by repackaging country cures to urban readers, mixing different traditions and incorporating different voices, such as those of herb women and midwives, by appropriating these identities, the text became eclectic and rich. Arguably, anyone could find something of interest in a book by Fioravanti. Plus, the language was so accessible. According to him, everyone should have access to medical knowledge:

Of course, this excessive modesty is cleverly constructed; he knew (and expected) that his books would be read by the nobility and learned people in general. As always, marketing was at the centre of his style and the way he self-fashioned his persona. Fioravanti’s books described remedies people could make themselves, but he also wrote how – if you preferred to – you could buy the medicines directly at the pharmacies he recommended. When you went to a pharmacy, you could often buy his books there. And, of course, you could have a consultation with Fioravanti himself if you so wished, and buy either remedies or books from him. Everything was cleverly connected. Because it was tricky to make much money as a writer (keep in mind that copyright was still very much in its early days, books were plagiarised all the time and writers weren’t always paid properly, especially when a book was reprinted), it was better not to rely on book sales exclusively. And, with the demand for novelty, there was always a market for new books and new recipes – even though many of them were similar, cure-all elixirs.

Still, Fioravanti was obsessed with fame, and he believed he would achieve it through print. ‘Only those who are written up in books live forever’, he wrote. It’s true that printing transformed what it meant to be famous in this period. And it did make things easier for future historians. 

So, all was going well for Fioravanti in Venice. He had a stable medical practice, he was friends with pharmacists – in fact, his remedies were by then sold in Naples, Rome, Milan and even London. He was writing and publishing nonstop. The Holy Roman Emperor even invited him to serve as a military surgeon in the campaign against the Turks in Hungary, but he declined the offer. He also received a letter from Naples saying that he was greatly missed and that his supporters were raising funds to get him to return and become a city physician. Once more, Fioravanti declined it – and the considerable salary he would make. Instead, he sent copies of his books to be sold in Naples. He must have felt that he was thriving in Venice.

Still, technically, he was once more practising medicine illegally. He hadn’t obtained a license from the Venetian Health Board, the Provveditori alla Sanità. He was allowed to work as a surgeon, meaning he could treat the body externally – wounds, broken limbs etc. But not internally – he couldn’t prescribe medicines to be taken orally like physicians did, for instance, since he didn’t have a medical degree. But that wasn’t the only problem. Venetian physicians accused him of putting his patients in danger and of being a vagabond. The following year, they accused Fioravanti of outright killing his patients with his violent treatments – which he called the ‘conspiracy of doctors’ against him. So, for the first time in 20 years, he returned to Bologna, which he called his dolce patria. He applied for doctorates in both medicine and arts. And, believe it or not, he got them; he became a doctor in his 50s. You can still see the document in the Archivio di Stato di Bologna, the state archive. As a graduate, he also got a palatine knighthood which, even though it was just an honorific title, he was quick to add to his books. He became the ‘doctor and knight’, Leonardo Fioravanti.

By then, Fioravanti had crafted his public persona as a worldly gentleman and doctor championing ‘true’ medicine against all odds – and against the corrupt medical establishment. He described himself in heroic terms:

To attain this noble goal, he needed to write in his readers’ ‘mother tongue’ as he called it. But his unquestionable success at the time was also due to walking the fine line between revealing all his medical secrets to his readers and keeping them intrigued. For instance, some recipes were published in cypher:

But he would make sure not to make this too hard to read. If you read each word backwards, you can crack the code. This one reads : ‘mirabilia magna in opera et esperientia da far veder miracoli al mondo‘, or a great marvel in works and experience to make miracles be seen in the world. As always, Fioravanti was an expert in ‘popularising’ knowledge, and his flamboyant style only made the books more entertaining.  This is one of the reasons, I think, why people like him weren’t taken very seriously by historians for a long time, though that has been changing. ‘Professors of secrets’ like him paved the way for the scientific revolution. But, clearly, not everyone was impressed. I say that because, the next time we meet Fioravanti, he’s in jail.

Fioravanti Everywhere – From a Milanese Jail to the Spanish Court

After the whole debacle of being accused by physicians in Venice of fraud, Fioravanti went to Milan. Unfortunately, the college of physicians there was not impressed with his methods either. In 1573, they accused him of poisoning his patients and he was sent to jail. Naturally, Fioravanti attributed this to envy. And, always theatrical, he decided to defend his reputation by challenging the college physicians to a medical duel of sorts. This is what Fioravanti wrote:

I haven’t found anything in terms of the physicians’ reply, but it seems to me very unlikely that they would agree to the challenge. In any case, a few years later, we find him in Spain, at the court of King Phillip II. He had written to the Viceroy of Naples, reminding him that he had served Phillip’s father, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V during the African war, as a military surgeon. The king then invited Fioravanti to his court, which shouldn’t be too surprising, as the king was very interested in alchemy and had several Italian alchemists in his court. Fioravanti was well known in Spanish circles – the king himself had four of his books in his private library. However, predictably, even though he was called by some courtiers a ‘saint’ and a ‘prophet’ capable of curing virtually anything, he was once more charged with practising medicine illegally. Again, he defended himself by saying the Spanish physicians were jealous of his success. His accusers argued that his diplomas from Bologna couldn’t possibly be valid, as Fioravanti didn’t know Latin. As always, Fioravanti’s comeback was that he didn’t need to learn Latin to know medicine. He had learnt from experience.

This was the central message in his works, one which translators kept in versions of the texts in other languages. One of his French translators, for instance, wrote that:

The European hunger for new treatments and the eclectic style of Fioravanti’s texts turned him into a European phenomenon. He was highly successful in translation; his works were published in French, Spanish, German and English, and he had fans and disciples from Portugal to Poland. The historian William Eamon recounts how there are even records of some of his books being exported to the New World. They were included in a bookseller’s shipment to Mexico in 1603.

Having said that, Fioravanti was never really successful in finding patrons. He wrote to Cosimo I de’ Medici multiple times, promising everything from a new soap recipe to teach the duke how to make an ‘unsinkable’ ship, as though he was an engineer. (Funnily enough, there had been a famous engineer and architect from Bologna, Aristotele Fioravanti, who lived a century before him, and who had been very famous. He even designed the Assumption Cathedral and the Kremlin for Ivan III of Russia. I haven’t found any evidence of them being related, but it sounds like the marketing-savvy doctor was once more trying to capitalise on this name connection.)

Fioravanti would dedicate his book to noblemen, such as the Duke of Ferrara, in the hope of finding a patron, but that never happened. After decades of travelling, Fioravanti eventually returned to Naples. Maybe he sensed that death was approaching, as he wrote in a 1583 book: ‘…this will be the end of my labours […] buena noche per siempre.’ It is possible that, like many alchemists, he had been exposed to toxins such as heavy metals, especially mercury, for long periods while experimenting, and that might have played a part in his death. But we can’t be sure. In any case, after becoming one of the most famous people in the 16th century, Fioravanti died. But the way he was seen by others has greatly changed through time, and that tells us a lot about the history of medicine, too.

A Forgotten Celebrity

Fioravanti had openly challenged the medical establishment in many cities and rejected Galenism and the humoral theory. He had created an alternative medical system, which relied heavily on ridding the body of internal corruptions, especially in the stomach. His theatrical and charismatic persona and flamboyant and eclectic writing style, full of unbelievable stories, had made him a success. He was a master at shaping and reshaping his image, in promoting himself and establishing a ‘brand’, as we would call it today. The balsamo di Fioravanti, Fioravanti’s balsam, was still sold in Italian pharmacies in the beginning of the 20th century. And you can still buy some hair products with his name on it, believe it or not! He was the most prolific ‘professor of secrets’ of his day, and his methods and writings surely had an impact on what would later be called the ‘Scientific Revolution’. He was well-regarded during the height of chemical medicine in the 17th and 18th centuries, along with Paracelsus, and his remedies appeared in pharmacopoeias well into the 18th century.

Just a side note: although there were many similarities between Paracelsus and Fioravanti, it’s debatable whether we could say he was a Paracelsian. Fioravanti’s English disciples thought so, but I’m not convinced. (By the way, I wrote a short article about this rebranding of Fioravanti as a Paracelsian in Britain, if you’d like to learn more about it.) I think he admired Paracelsus, but he created his own system which was different from Paracelsianism. But, while Paracelsus is still well known, Fioravanti was either completely forgotten or relegated to a minor, slightly embarrassing, footnote in the history of medicine.

Nineteenth-century historians have found it difficult to place Fioravanti in their narratives. But historians are a product of their times just like everyone else, and have their own reasons for selecting their sources and deciding how to read them. And, in the 19th century, the history of medicine was largely being written by physicians and used as an instrument in the growing professionalisation of the field. Someone like Fioravanti, who they perceived as a charlatan, did not help legitimise a scientific image of medicine. It’s hard to overstate their despise for Fioravanti, but I think Salvatore de Renzi, a 19th-century physician, sums it up:

You could say he wasn’t a fan. But that’s the thing. History is never a tidy narrative, and the history of medicine isn’t a straightforward march to progress. History is full of complexities and contradictions, and Fioravanti is a good example of that. People like him sought to understand the world around them through practical experience, and questioned old-established ways of thinking. It would be hard to imagine a scientific revolution without this open-mindedness and curiosity. And we don’t have to choose between people like Fioravanti and Paracelsus, Galen and Alessio Piemontese. They are all part of the story.

If you’re interested in the history of everyday life, case studies like this can really tell a lot, from how alchemy, pharmacies, and the printing press were connected to how medical knowledge was created. This is why I’m so glad that, after a long time as a footnote in history, more historians are studying how people like Fioravanti – and the ‘old women’ who taught him so much – played a crucial part in history. Fioravanti longed for his name to be forever remembered. In truth, as William Eamon described it, he only got a short moment of celebrity. And, although I’m not sure about contemporary descriptions of him as ‘the glorious Fioravanti, the man of new miracles’, I do believe he deserves to be remembered. 

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Primary Sources:

Leonardo Fioravanti, Capricci medicinali (1561).

———, Compendio di tutta la cirurgia (1561).

———, Dello Specchio di scientia universale (1564).

———, Del Regimmento della peste (1565).

———, Tesoro della vita Humana (1570).

———, La Cirurgia (1570).

———, Della Fisica (1577).

———, Les Caprices touchant la medicine (1586).

Tommaso Garzoni, Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (1589).

Further Reading:

Rudolph Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (1999).

William Eamon, ‘Alchemy in Popular Culture: Leonardo Fioravanti and the Search for the Philosopher’s Stone’, Early Science and Medicine, 5 (2000), pp. 196–213.

———, ‘Pharmaceutical Self-Fashioning or How to Get Rich and Famous in the Renaissance Medical Marketplace’, Pharmacy in History, 3 (2003), pp. 123–29.

———, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (1994).

———, The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy (2010).

Davide Giordano, Leonardo Fioravanti Bolognese (1920).

Giuseppe Gentili, ‘Leonardo Fioravanti Bolognese alla Luce d’ignorati Documenti’, Rivista di Storia delle Scienze (1951), pp. 16–40.

Julia Martins, Secrets of Women: Translating the Female Body in Early Modern Books of Secrets (1555-1700), KCL PhD Thesis (2023). 

Julia Martins, ‘The Mother of All Things: Reshaping Medical Knowledge in Translation’, Epoch, March 2023. 

Isabelle Pantin, ‘John Hester’s Translations of Leonardo Fioravanti: The Literary Career of a London Distiller’, in Andrew Pettegree, S.K. Barker, and Brenda Hosington (eds.), Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473-1640 (2013), pp. 159–83.

Alfredo Perifano, ‘La Théorie cachée ou de la pratique vulgarisé dans le Compendio de i Secreti Rationali (1564) de Leonardo Fioravanti’, in Dominique de Courcelles (ed.), Ouvrages miscellanées et théories de la connaissance à la Renaissance (2003), pp. 117–29.