The Professor Of Secrets by William Eamon

What we find appalling and abhorrent changes from generation to generation as ever-shifting cultural norms redefine our prejudices and our tolerances. However, it's one thing to acknowledge that we once allowed children to work in coal mines; it's entirely a different horror to read the intimate and disgusting details of how medicine was practiced during the Renaissance. Perhaps, in a hundred years, our descendants will look back at us and, in the same vein, shake their heads at the barbarity of Chemotherapy which is, in effect, a scorched earth policy applied to the human body, but surely that won't be the same as reading about early rhinoplasty, in which 16th century surgeons sliced open the skin of the patient's upper arm, slid a piece of wool underneath the skin, medicated the area until the skin thickened to the proper amount, then transferred this excruciatingly prepared substitute to the patient's ruined nose, cutting the skin as needed to make for a proper fit. The surgeon capped off this anaesthetic-free procedure by forcing a metal form down over the new, well-stitched, nose, leaving it there until it could hold its own shape. I'm sure there will be other procedures I find equally as awful as this one, but I doubt they will exceed it.

Mr. Eamon's fascinating, if disturbing, biography of Leonardo Fioravanti, a 16th century Italian surgeon, contains many of these shiver-inducing anecdotes, but these 360 some pages contain more than just moments of revulsion. This is a sprawling illumination of Renaissance Italy, its powerbrokers, its customs, and most importantly its rigid hierarchies. Fioravanti is depicted here as a dogged doctor with a mind opened to new possibilities. Whatever skill in medicine he could claim, however, paled next to the brilliance of his showmanship which seems to have been first-class. His hunger to be both rich and famous seems about equal to his obsessive need to be right, even when proven wrong. And so, not content with the simple satisfaction of bettering his own understanding of medicine, Fioravanti reached out to a far more powerful world than his, overestimating himself and his authority and incurring some eminent enemies.

Though The Professor Of Secrets lacks the dark humor of History's Worst Jobs, it has something of that book's spirit. Mr. Eamon set out to expose a brilliant man, a brightening world, and its primitive practices, but his descriptions of some of the period's brutalities will be what I carry with me. I'm still wincing! Dry in parts, slow in others, but always enlightening and disturbing. (3/5 Stars)