Medical History of the Medici: Wealth, Power, Disease and Death
Guest Lectures
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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.
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