PUBLIC LECTURE: Annual Cassamarca Lecture - "It's the patient's fault": Simone Simoni and the plague

Physician, philosopher, moralist, and spy, Simone Simoni of Lucca (1532-1602) spent most of his life in exile as a doctor in N. Europe. In 1575, when plague broke out in Leipzig, he was the personal physician of the Elector of Saxony, involved also in the medical life of the town and its university. His `Artificiosa curandae pestis methodus', 1576, not only defends his, far from creditable, role in the outbreak, but develops in unusual ways the theories put forward in 1546 by Girolamo Fracastoro to explain contagion and contagious diseases. Simoni's treatise introduces to N. Europe new Italian ideas, while at the same time revealing many of the tensions, both public and private, that were caused by the arrival of plague.

Biographical note: Vivian Nutton is a Professor at Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London. His publications include From Democedes to Harvey: Studies in the History of Medicine (1988), Galen, On My Own Opinions (1999), The Western Medical Tradition (1995, co-author) and Ancient Medicine, a standard work on the history of medicine before 1600 (2004).

This event is the Annual Cassamarca Lecture, and is presented as part of the symposium Humanism and Medicine in the Early Modern Era. The symposium is presented by the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia with the Australian Research Council Network for Early European Studies (NEER) and the Cassamarca Foundation.

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