Healing Plants of Renaissance Florence

Healing Plants of Renaissance Florence
Author: Angela Paine
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2024-12-10
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1803413123

The Renaissance was a period of unparalleled beauty, excitement, and interest in Florence, despite frequent plagues and wars, thanks in large part to the presence of the Medici family, who virtually invented modern banking and accountancy. They were outstanding as enlightened and successful patrons of art, architecture, science, philosophy, and above all, every aspect of plant medicine. They collected medicinal and rare plants and created large botanic gardens, which are still there today. The Medici patronage of the University of Pisa, Cosimo I's creation of the chair of simples (medicinal plants), and his employment of Luca Ghini revolutionised how herbal medicine was taught. This book traces the development of the first hospital and academic medicinal plant garden in Florence, under the guidance of the great Cosimo I de Medici, and looks at the plants he and his sons used in their alchemical laboratories to create herbal medicines. A selection of these plants is investigated in detail, looking at how they can be used today, including their chemistry and healing properties, as well as research that has been carried out on them.

The World of Plants in Renaissance Tuscany

The World of Plants in Renaissance Tuscany
Author: Cristina Bellorini
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 131701149X

In the sixteenth century medicinal plants, which until then had been the monopoly of apothecaries, became a major topic of investigation in the medical faculties of Italian universities, where they were observed, transplanted, and grown by learned physicians both in the wild and in the newly founded botanical gardens. Tuscany was one of the main European centres in this new field of inquiry, thanks largely to the Medici Grand Dukes, who patronised and sustained research and teaching, whilst also taking a significant personal interest in plants and medicine. This is the first major reconstruction of this new world of plants in sixteenth-century Tuscany. Focusing primarily on the medical use of plants, this book also shows how plants, while maintaining their importance in therapy, began to be considered and studied for themselves, and how this new understanding prepared the groundwork for the science of botany. More broadly this study explores how the New World's flora impacted on existing botanical knowledge and how this led to the first attempts at taxonomy.

Drugs on the Page

Drugs on the Page
Author: Matthew James Crawford
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2019-05-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0822986833

In the early modern Atlantic World, pharmacopoeias—official lists of medicaments and medicinal preparations published by municipal, national, or imperial governments—organized the world of healing goods, giving rise to new and valuable medical commodities such as cinchona bark, guaiacum, and ipecac. Pharmacopoeias and related texts, developed by governments and official medical bodies as a means to standardize therapeutic practice, were particularly important to scientific and colonial enterprises. They served, in part, as tools for making sense of encounters with a diversity of peoples, places, and things provoked by the commercial and colonial expansion of early modern Europe. Drugs on the Page explores practices of recording, organizing, and transmitting information about medicinal substances by artisans, colonial officials, indigenous peoples, and others who, unlike European pharmacists and physicians, rarely had a recognized role in the production of official texts and medicines. Drawing on examples across various national and imperial contexts, contributors to this volume offer new and valuable insights into the entangled histories of knowledge resulting from interactions and negotiations between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans from 1500 to 1850.

Renaissance Art & Science @ Florence

Renaissance Art & Science @ Florence
Author: Susan B. Puett
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2016-08-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0271091320

The creativity of the human mind was brilliantly displayed during the Florentine Renaissance when artists, mathematicians, astronomers, apothecaries, architects, and others embraced the interconnectedness of their disciplines. Artists used mathematical perspective in painting and scientific techniques to create new materials; hospitals used art to invigorate the soul; apothecaries prepared and dispensed, often from the same plants, both medicinals for patients and pigments for painters; utilitarian glassware and maps became objects to be admired for their beauty; art enhanced depictions of scientific observations; and innovations in construction made buildings canvases for artistic grandeur. An exploration of these and other intersections of art and science deepens our appreciation of the magnificent contributions of the extraordinary Florentines.

Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa

Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa
Author: Kalle Kananoja
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1108871828

In this ambitious analysis of medical encounters in Central and West Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, Kalle Kananoja focuses on African and European perceptions of health, disease and healing. Arguing that the period was characterised by continuous knowledge exchange, he shows that indigenous natural medicine was used by locals and non-Africans alike. The mobility and circulation of healing techniques and materials was an important feature of the early modern Black Atlantic world. African healing specialists not only crossed the Atlantic to the Americas, but also moved within and between African regions to offer their services. At times, patients, Europeans included, travelled relatively long distances in Africa to receive treatment. Highlighting cross-cultural medical exchanges, Kananoja shows that local African knowledge was central to shaping responses to illness, providing a fresh, global perspective on African medicine and vernacular science in the early modern world.

Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence

Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence
Author: Rebekah Compton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 637
Release: 2021-03-11
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1108916058

In this volume, Rebekah Compton offers the first survey of Venus in the art, culture, and governance of Florence from 1300 to 1600. Organized chronologically, each of the six chapters investigates one of the goddess's alluring attributes – her golden splendor, rosy-hued complexion, enchanting fashions, green gardens, erotic anatomy, and gifts from the sea. By examining these attributes in the context of the visual arts, Compton uncovers an array of materials and techniques employed by artists, patrons, rulers, and lovers to manifest Venusian virtues. Her book explores technical art history in the context of love's protean iconography, showing how different discourses and disciplines can interact in the creation and reception of art. Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence offers new insights on sight, seduction, and desire, as well as concepts of gender, sexuality, and viewership from both male and female perspectives in the early modern era.

The Flowering of Florence

The Flowering of Florence
Author: Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2002
Genre: Art
ISBN:

Published to coincide with an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, of sixty-eight works of art, primarily from Florentine collections, The Flowering of Florence explores the close ties between art and the natural sciences in Tuscany as seen in the botanical renderings created in Florence for the Medici grand dukes from the late 1500s through the early 1700s. The catalog comprises an essay and checklist with reproductions of the exquisite works in the show. Examples include Jacopo Ligozzi's plant drawings in tempera on paper from the Uffizi Gallery, Giovanna Garzoni's fruit and flower paintings on vellum, and Bartolomeo Bimbi's later and much larger still-life paintings.

Ireland's Hidden Medicine

Ireland's Hidden Medicine
Author: Rosarie Kingston
Publisher: Aeon Books
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2021-10-28
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1913504980

An exploration of the rich herbal healing traditions of Ireland which resonate through the country’s landscape, music, festivals and language. Indigenous medicine, no matter where it exists in the world, is characterised by the oral transmission of knowledge and the necessity for each person to be in harmony with themselves, their society and environment, as well as the spirit world. Ireland is no different, and its traditional therapeutic approach is designed to address body, mind, spirit and emotions within the local social and environmental context. However, these ancient healing traditions are increasingly neglected due to the dominance of biomedicine as the country's primary system of healthcare. Ireland's Hidden Medicine explores how the core elements of any medical system are always the same: diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and prevention of ill health. These central elements do not change, but the medical systems which give them expression may evolve, mutate, and even die, because their fortunes are tied up with the changing cultural, technological, and economic paradigms of their societies. This book provides a fascinating look at the history and fortunes of Irish folk medicine - from the legendary god of healing, Dein Checht, to the coming of Christianity and the religious and social backdrop of the nation's development. The book also provides a seasonal guide to utilising Ireland's indigenous medicine, which provides a wealth of benefits and a connection to a sacred and therapeutic landscape.

Learned Physicians and Everyday Medical Practice in the Renaissance

Learned Physicians and Everyday Medical Practice in the Renaissance
Author: Michael Stolberg
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 637
Release: 2021-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110733544

Michael Stolberg offers the first comprehensive presentation of medical training and day-to-day medical practice during the Renaissance. Drawing on previously unknown manuscript sources, he describes the prevailing notions of illness in the era, diagnostic and therapeutic procedures, the doctor–patient relationship, and home and lay medicine.