Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain by Paolo Savoia (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain by Paolo Savoia
• Viktoria von Hoffmann (bio)

Paolo Savoia. Gaspare Tagliacozzi and Early Modern Surgery: Faces, Men, and Pain. London: Routledge, 2019. 284 pp. Paperback, $51.99.

A translated and slightly revised edition of Paolo Savoia's Cosmesi e Chirurgia. Bellezza, dolore e medicina nell'Italia moderna (Milano, Editrice Bibliografica, 2017), this study follows Gaspare Tagliacozzi's (1545–1599) two-volume scholarly and technical book on the reconstructive surgery of the face, entitled De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem (On the surgical restoration of defects by grafting). The Bolognese physician and anatomist, often held to be the "father of plastic surgery," published this work in 1597 to present and justify the arm-flap method of reconstructing the mutilated parts of the nose. This procedure consisted in cutting a skin flap from the upper region of the arm and grafting it onto the nose, then keeping the two parts—arm and nose—attached together for three weeks before cutting the skin from the arm and shaping the new nose with the use of special molds. No doubt this was an impressive, demanding, and painful surgical procedure. But why would patients have opted to endure such a surgery, and who would have purchased a detailed and illustrated monograph on the subject? How, in short, did a textual tradition about reconstructive surgery emerge in print during the Renaissance? Answers, Savoia suggests, are to be found by exploring the very specific social, political, economic, medical, and cultural context of late sixteenth-century Bologna.

The originality of Savoia's work lies in the great variety of angles, sources, questions, and fields he explores in order to cast light on this context. As he explains in the introduction, his aim is to offer a sort of histoire totale of Tagliacozzi's book by "pulling together […] various threads and methodologies" to highlight "the many facets of a practice and a discourse" (7). He therefore alternates micro-historical [End Page 221] inquiries about medical practitioners with wider theoretical explorations of Renaissance cultures of the face and shifting understandings of the body. The range and diversity of the primary sources is impressive, from archives documenting surgical practices and training to printed books from empirical and learned surgeons, and from books of secrets, physiognomy works, and agronomic treatises to natural philosophical and historical texts, in Latin and in the vernacular. These sources are used to provide fresh insights about the lives, training, careers, and social aspirations of barbers (who routinely performed what we would now consider minor surgical procedures) and surgeons, which in turn shed light on the context that shaped and informed the production of the De curtorum. And as Savoia shows, this is the same context that helped construct concepts of both surgical expertise and masculinity in the sixteenth century.

Among the many themes and questions covered by the book, three main threads seem both central to the author's argument and germane to current scholarly discussions conducted across disciplinary boundaries: the notion of a sprawling category of sixteenth-century body workers; gendered experiences of pain; and the intersections between art and nature in the Renaissance.

First, the main characters of the book are what Savoia calls Renaissance "practitioners of the body." Building on Sandra Cavallo's important work on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century "artisans of the body,"¹ he proposes a less broad but equally fluid category for earlier artisans concerned with the care of health and appearance (politezza) in the Papal state. These artisans (graduate and nongraduate surgeons, barbers, and barber-surgeons) have often been considered more distinct from one another than the documentary evidence suggests. The author shows the continuity of skills, instruments, and practices among them, arguing that surgeons and barbers should be considered as "different kinds within one and the same category of practitioners of the body" (134). Likewise, surgery and cosmetics were "placed on a continuum or at least within the same professional culture" (133). Similarly, Savoia argues, the relations between physicians and barber-surgeons should be understood in a more nuanced way, especially in Italy, where surgery was a prestigious discipline taught at the university. He proposes that we consider...