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Professor Strocchia's talk examines how the commercialization of medical remedies impacted empirical practices in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italy. Professor Strocchia argues that new forms of experimentation such as testing drugs on human subjects to establish their safety and efficacy – what we would now call clinical trials – were driven in large part by commercial motives rather than by purely intellectual or “scientific” interests. These empirical demonstrations or “proof tests” were not simply the products of inquisitive minds working in university lecture halls, scientific academies, or princely courts but were largely market-driven responses by non-elite actors to new state marketing requirements. Most early clinical trials, which numbered in the hundreds across Italy after 1550, involved poor hospital patients; their physical and subjective responses to experimental remedies gave them an unrecognized role in the construction of new medical knowledge. Besides highlighting the role of the market in the early modern culture of experimentation, the archival evidence analyzed in this lecture showcases some of the interpretive problems inherent in using the body as an instrument of proof making.

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Italian Studies.