Contracting a cure : patients, healers, and the law in early modern Bologna
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Contracting a cure : patients, healers, and the law in early modern Bologna
Johns Hopkins University Press, c1998
- Other Title
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La promessa di guarigione : Malati e curatori in antico regime.
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [269]-275) and indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The author recounts the story of the relationship between healers and patients in the 16th and 17th centuries whereby the practitioner was contractually bound to heal a sick person within a specified period of time, for a stipulated sum. If the patient was not cured, no money changed hands. When disputes over payment arose, the cases were heard by the Protomedicato, the judicial arm of the College of Medicine. By the end of the period, according to Pomata, this system was undermined as physicians and jurists both recognized that payment by results was incompatible with the professionalization of medicine. Rather than presenting simply a history of medical professionalization, the text reconstructs in detail patients' perceptions of the body and disease as recorded in the Bolognese records and extensively uses the voices of both the healers and the healed. In telling the history of contracting for a cure - describing the vanished world of meanings that patients and healers gave to their encounters - Pomata uncovers a notion of justice profoundly different from the one that regulates medical practice today.
The history of the cure agreement, she argues, is but a fragment in a wider history of the notions of justice we have lost.
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