Exploring Women's Health and Medical Treatment in Renaissance Italy Through Giovanni Marinello's Treatise
Authors: Peirats Anna 
Published: November 2024

This article looks at a 16th-century medical book called Le medicine partenenti alle infermità delle donne by Giovanni Marinello (Venice, 1574), who wrote it intending to assist midwives and other delivery attendants in improving their professional practices. It is a very successful text that serves as an illustration of the rich body of treatises on women's diseases that were published in Europe in the sixteenth century and up until the first half of the seventeenth and which, despite disagreements and controversies, reflect a rekindled and passionate interest in medicine for the uniqueness of the female body that is beginning to diverge from the scholastic view of woman as an imperfect male. In addition, Marinello's work depicts the nature of contemporary daily life. It provides in great detail natural cures for sterility issues and all conditions related to pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum, always within the bounds of what is reasonable for a period defined by the ideas of the Council of Trent. The writings of Giovanni Marinello on women's diseases and cosmetics have two main advantages: first, they present traditional medical notions about female physiology and pathology in a way that is understandable through the use of colloquial language and an unpretentious style; second, they provide invaluable information on aspects of daily life. A significant portion of this practical book, which contains both prescribing and discursive material, is devoted to issues related to health and disease, the look of the body in life, pain, and methods to address these issues. Discussions include the human obligation to compete with natural rules, reflections on aesthetic canons and goals, and the interaction between nature and art or technology. The analysis of Marinello's texts focuses on both the form and the substance to make them accessible to a primarily female readership. The purpose of Marinello's three books, organized in a chronological order that starts with marriage and ends with childbirth, is to inform women of all the methods for maintaining their bodies and posses-sions. In the first book, we discuss eliminating all the annoying obstacles like urinary incontinence or lousy breath while discussing various sterility therapies in the seco- nd and pregnancy and childbirth in the third one. Despite the abundance of graphic and comprehensive erotic counsel, Marinello always sees it as an essential medical treatise while guaranteeing procreation. Mari- nello consequently highlights women's health through reproduction to safeguard the marriage and family unit. In addition to viewing health as the outcome of humoral balance, me- dieval medicine, based on the Hippocratic idea of humor, also consi- dered that physicians were responsible for aiding in the redemption of the soul alongside preachers (Jacquart & Thomasset, 1989; Lan, 1970). Especially when we consider that medical texts were written in Latin, a preferred language for disseminating science, until well into the seven- teenth and even the eighteenth century, the healing of diseases was associated with an unquestionable hermeticism, only accessible to spe- cialists, never to patients' objectives. As a counterpart to the idea of a Latin language associated with science, this study aims to present a guided reading of a work written in Italian, Le medicine partenenti alle enfermità delle donne, by Giovanni Marinello, the first to use his lan- guage instead of scientific Latin.