Medical History of the Medici: Wealth, Power, Disease and Death
Guest Lectures
•
57m
From 1397 to 1743, the Medici family was the most powerful family in Florence and one of the most influential in Europe. They produced bankers, politicians, rulers of Florence and Rome (four popes) and Pan-European aristocrats. Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici started things off by founding the Medici Bank. The Grand Ducal line ended with the death of Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici. Along with nobility and wealth, family members suffered a wide variety of acute and chronic disorders. Throughout this 350-year period, the Medici schemed, ruled, lived, got sick and died.
Join physiologist and medical historian, Dr. Jeremy Wasser, for an overview of the diseases that plagued the Medici throughout their time at the center European power. Their very name means “doctors” in Italian. What did they suffer from and how were they treated by the physicians of their times? What did they die from and how do we know so much about their physical conditions before and after death? Although women during this entire period were not permitted to formally study medicine, was Anna Maria Luisa (the last of the Medici) a physician/healer and alchemist? Let’s find out!
Jeremy Wasser, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Physiology at Texas A&M University. Dr. Wasser serves as the program leader for study abroad programs in Germany, focused on the history of medicine, providing future doctors and biomedical science researchers with a foundation in physiology and the medical humanities. Along with his scientific publications he has written and lectured on the culture of disease, the history of public health and health policy, the history of human experimentation, and the role of physiological education in contemplative
practices. Additionally, Wasser’s training in opera and theatre inform the unique personas that he creates for lectures in the history of medicine and performances related to science and storytelling.
Up Next in Guest Lectures
-
Bernini's Angelic Path in the Basilic...
Through the patronage of Pope Urban VIII Barberini (1623-1644), Innocent X Pamphili (1644-1655), Alexander VII Chigi (1655-1667) and Clement IX Rospigliosi (1667-1669), Gian Lorenzo Bernini had created one of the biggest artistic workshops in the history of Rome. It must have been a true industry...
-
The Notorious HVB: The Mystical and M...
On September 16 in the year 1098, Mechthild of Merxheim was delivered of her 10th child. As was the custom, the little girl was given to the Church at the age of eight as an “oblate”, destined to become a nun and live a life of service to God. Thus began the saga of one of the most famous and fas...
-
Getting Lost in the Renaissance: The ...
A merchant in fourteenth-century Naples has to relieve himself at night in an alley, a woodcarver in fifteenth-century Florence decides to ignore a dinner invitation, the poet Petrarch finally arrives in Rome for the first time, and a Roman servant returning to his native city can’t remember wher...
