Niccolò Moranghelli, a Libellous Physician

The struggle among medical professors between supporters of a revived classicism and those who sought to introduce innovations both practical and theoretical and to criticize and correct Galen dominated much of sixteenth-century medicine. Although the teachers of the University of Paris, notably Guinther of Andernach and Jacobus Sylvius, were prepared to make small modifications to the doctrines of the ancient authors, their loyalty and the limits of their own studies often led them to retain many errors, and they wholeheartedly opposed the revolutionary anatomical teachings of Vesalius.1 At the University of Bologna it was only in 1586 that works other than those of Galen were permitted for comment by the medical faculty, and the Galenism of the Spanish medical fraternity may well have influenced Vesalius in his decision to leave Spain in 1564.2 But our information on the decline of Galenism comes almost entirely from the highest levels of the medical profession, the academic doctors who published learned works, and we cannot as yet decide how far the effects of this debate were felt by the average small-town physician. In the series of documents that follows, describing a doctors' quarrel at Viadana in the Duchy of Mantua in 1569, medical as well as personal disagreements can be invoked in explanation, and a distinction can be made between the old-fashioned erudition of the local man and the modern ideas of the newly arrived physician. As well as showing the turbulent and dangerous life of a doctor in an Italian town, the case of Niccolo Moranghelli indicates, in an unusually personal way, some of the obstacles to the spread of new theories and the determined conservatism that opposed it. The chance preservation in the Cambridge University Library of two books containing many marginalia by Niccol6 Moranghelli, Hippocrates, Liber de somniis cum Iulii C. Scaligeri commentariis, Lyons 1539 (=I), and L. Jacchinus, Galeni liber de praecognitione, Lyons 1540 (=II), offers an opportunity to assess the scholarly capabilities of this prickly physician, for he diligently added parallel references to other texts and occasionally castigated erroneous opinions. Although his place of education is unknown to me (Ferrara? or Padova?), his annotations suggest a man of learning, especially of the ancients, with a useful library. He cites several tracts of Galen: Methodus medendi, I 7, II 5 and 55; De usu partium, I 13; De creticis, I 30; Thrasybulus I 41; De antidotis, II 41; De libris propriis, 11 41; De ptisana, II 81; De causis symptomatum, II 84; De differentiisfebrium, II 88; De generatione et corruptione, II 96; De diebus iudicialibus, 1 43; In Hippocratis librum De regimine in morbis acutis commentarium, II 52; five works of Hippocrates: Deflatu, I ll; Aphorismi, I 62; De diaeta, II 6; *Selwyn College, Cambridge.