SANTORIO AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH

Problemata Literature in the 16th Century

António Luís’ «Problematum Libri Quinque» (1539)

Henrique Leitão

24 March 2026 - 5 pm (CET) 

In this lecture, Henrique Leitão examines the sixteenth-century revival of the Problemata tradition through António Luís’ Problematum libri quinque (Lisbon, 1539). Beginning from Luís’ own definition of a problem as the search for the unknown cause of a manifest phenomenon, the lecture situates the work within the broader Aristotelian tradition of causal inquiry. It shows how the Problemata genre allowed scholars to propose explanations while keeping questions of causation open, thereby loosening strict Aristotelian epistemic constraints.

Matter Prepared, Form Received

Pharmacological Theory in 14th-Century Italy

Marilena Panarelli

14 April 2026 - 5 pm (CET) 

Taddeo Alderotti (c. 1215–1295) and Dino del Garbo (c. 1270–1327), two leading figures of fourteenth-century Italian medicine, stand at the centre of this lecture. Marilena Panarelli examines how their writings linked pharmacology to broader debates in natural philosophy, especially through the concepts of complexio and forma specifica. By following the theoretical relationship between bodily constitution and the hidden powers of substances, the lecture shows how medieval physicians explained the action of remedies and integrated Aristotelian and Avicennian ideas into medical theory and practice. 

Michael Servetus and the Circulation of the Blood

The History of a Mistaken Idea

Justo Hernandez

28 April 2026 - 5 pm (CET) 

Did a Spanish theologian anticipate the discovery of the circulation of the blood? This lecture revisits the case of Michael Servetus (c. 1509–1553), whose Christianismi restitutio (1553) contains a description of the pulmonary transit of blood. By tracing the rediscovery of this rare work in the eighteenth century by the Encyclopedists Diderot and d’Alembert, it shows how Servetus came to be credited with anticipating Harvey’s breakthrough. The lecture argues that Servetus’ account emerged from a theological attempt to explain how the soul enters the body rather than from a physiological theory of circulation.

From Natural History to Human Generation

Pliny the Elder as a Source of Renaissance Gynaecological Treatises

Gabriel Silva

12 May 2026 - 5 pm (CET) 

This lecture examines the role of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History in the formation of Renaissance gynaecological literature. Focusing on the use of Plinian material in Ludovico Bonaccioli’s Enneas muliebris (1475–1536) and Rodrigo de Castro Lusitano’s De uniuersa mulierum medicina (1546–1627/29), it traces how passages on extraordinary births, menstruation, and other mirabilia were incorporated into medical writing. Attention to these borrowings shows how Renaissance physicians drew on Pliny not only for medical information but also for a broader repertoire of names, cases, and marvels that shaped early modern discussions of women’s medicine. 

Santorio Award for Excellence in Research

Deadline: 31 March 2026

Edward Worth Research Fellowship

Deadline: 31 March 2026

Pere d’Olesa through Three Spanish 'Peregrini'

Professional advancement has often depended on movement across cities and universities. Through the case of the Catalan physician Pere d’Olesa (c. 1460-1531) and other Iberian practitioners, this article shows how geographical mobility enabled physicians to build careers and circulate learning within European institutional networks. 

'Lupus' and Nosological Ambiguities

In medieval medicine, cancer and lupus did not designate stable diseases but shifting diagnostic labels. By tracing how physicians used these terms in practice and in medical texts, this contribution shows how naming emerged from clinical observation, therapeutic reasoning, and inherited authorities. 

Iatrochemistry between Sylvius and De Graaf

This article examines how Franciscus Sylvius and his pupil Reinier de Graaf transformed iatrochemistry from a speculative framework into a clinical practice grounded in observation and experimentation. By analysing their work at the University of Leiden, Alessio Dore shows how chemical theories of bodily processes were tested at the patient’s bedside. 

A Humoral Perspective

In medieval medicine, urine was read as a visible index of cerebral processes. By reconstructing uroscopic practices and their theoretical foundations, this contribution shows how diagnostic interpretation connected fluids and the brain. It highlights how uroscopy functioned as a mediating practice between sensory evidence and speculative anatomy in the absence of direct access to the brain.

How did John Philoponus’s critique of Aristotelian natural philosophy reach Renaissance Europe? In this lecture, Tommaso De Robertis traces the recovery of Philoponus’s philosophy, from the rediscovery of Greek manuscripts by Italian humanists and Byzantine émigrés to its later circulation through print and Latin translation.

In this lecture, Shahrzad Irannejad discusses the very few, yet thought-provoking, visual representations of the brain and its ventricles in the medieval Islamicate tradition. While some illustrations appear in the Avicennan tradition, others feature in influential encyclopaedias of medicine, such as al-Rāzī’s.

Hiro Hirai looks at the various debates sparked by Fernel's "De abditis rerum causis" (1542) and how they influenced Sennert's work and the work of the subsequent generation of physicians. His analyses contribute to a better understanding of Sennert’s preoccupations and endeavours in their intellectual context.

Drawing on ancient microbial genomes,  Monica H. Green explores the evolutionary history and epidemiology of diseases such as plague, leprosy, and syphilis, and discusses what these scientific advances reveal about global disease circulation beyond traditional documentary records.

This issue of Sudhoffs Archiv (vol. 109, 2025/1) brings together three studies that will be of special interest to historians of medicine and science.

Thomas Emmrich reconstructs the long history of exchanges between medicine and language-based disciplines, showing that their present institutional separation arose only with modern specialisation and that earlier intellectual traditions treated linguistic competence as structurally embedded in medical reasoning.  

Zofia Rzeźnicka reassesses recipes for ancient deodorants attributed to Criton of Heraclea, demonstrating that these formulations functioned simultaneously as therapeutic preparations and as indicators of social hierarchy through ingredients such as myrrh.  

Klaus Peter Zeyer analyses rare anomalies in Gregorian Easter reckoning by comparing calculations based on mean and true astronomical data, establishing when these paradoxes occur and how often they can be expected across historical time.

Fabrizio Bigotti

John Wilkins

Forthcoming

Monica Catherine O'Brien

Forthcoming

 © Arbor: Knowledge That Grows

CSMBR Newsletter

Cover image: 

The Tree of the Sun and the Moon  

Maître de la Mazarine, 1410-1412

from Jean de Mandeville, "Voyages"

MS Français 2810, f. 220r

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR)
Domvs Comeliana, Via Pietro Maffi 48

56126  Pisa, Italy

info@csmbr.fondazionecomel.org

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