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Nancy G. Siraisi In Renaissance medical practice rhetoric had an ambiguous reputation. Many authors warned physicians against use of persuasion or repeated some version of the truism that patients are cured not by eloquence but by medicines. On the other hand, physicians were also reminded that by speaking well they helped patients to have confidence in their advice and to understand directions, which in turn facilitated cure.1 Yet some aspects of medical culture of the period between 1450 and 1600 seem profoundly attentive to rhetoric, at least as regards the use of language, performative elements, and the influence of these features in ancient models (most notably Galen himself).2 One area in which rhetoric had an unambiguous, acknowledged, and essential place was in the medical orations pronounced at university ceremonies. A sample follows: Pursuit of all these different things by study, investigation of obscurities with ingenuity, conquest of difficulties with industry, and--after penetrating into the very fibers of the earth and searching everywhere into the arcana of the whole of nature and from all herbs, fruits, trees, animals, gems, and even poisons--inquiry after remedies and the proper way to use them for all the ills of human life from
Journal of the History of Ideas – University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: Aug 10, 2004
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