Ars Medica and the therapeutic at the end of the Middle Ages.: The Genoa case

The therapeutic offer at the end of the Middle Ages was certainly highly differential, and the variety of the interventions (not necessarily their quality) corresponded with the different social recognizability of the operators. The medical practice was controlled by a strong hierarchy ranging from prominent physicians (the members of the Collegium), to the less famous and guaranteed ones, even if titled, down to those auxiliary figures (surgeons, barbers, ostetricians and chemists), that often acted autonomously, even knowing to contravene definite statutory and corporative rules. Next to these subject, totally illegally, there were also other social figures, particularly the exponents of the clergy. If this is the overall picture inferred in the essay in a circumstantial way, one wonders about the real formative strategies and the monopoly wielded by the members of the medical Corporation: a mechanism made of stricter and stricter bonds and prohibitions, often ignored. Then through the analysis of some textual evidence, locally found (from the consilia to the prescriptions), the extremely varied picture of the therapeutic services is given, together with their mutual relations and their systems of reference (from the academic tradition to the oral sphere). The last pages are devoted to a series of news of a pharmaceutical-nosographic character, which allow us to guess the pathocenosis of the Genoese society of the time.