Quick to say Quack. Medicinal Secrets from the Household to the Apothecarys Shop in Eighteenth-century Venice

摘要

This essay will present a documented Italian history of secrets devised in the late seventeenth century in an ordinary household, then temporarily brought into the world of (supposed) charlatanry and eventually taken on, from the end of the eighteenth up to the early twentieth century, by apothecaries. Drawing on a range of primary sources and a few printed texts analysed for their content and material features, the study provides a multi-generational portrait of handlers of medicinal secrets involving both male and female members, whom we might more accurately define as artisans of medicinal secrets rather than quacks, empirics or anything else. It is certain that Venetian medical legislation defined them as particular people. The case study also offers a picture of the web of social relationships that enabled a harmonious circulation of knowledge between professional, household and commercial medicine, and eventually led to the enrichment of the official pharmacopoeia.