For Saint Mercurialis of Forlì, see Saint Mercurialis

Saint Mercurialis

Mercurialis was the Christian bishop of Forlì, in Romagna. The historical figure known as Mercurialis attended the Council of Rimini in 359 and died around 406. He was a zealous opponent of paganism and Arianism....

. For the plant genus Mercurialis, see Mercury (plant)

Mercury (plant)

Mercurialis is a genus of plants in the family Euphorbiaceae, the spurges, known commonly as the mercuries. These are slender herbs , rhizomatious perennials and woody perennials...

.

Girolamo Mercuriale (also known as Geronimo Mercuriali or by his Latin name Hieronymus Mercurialis) (September 30, 1530 – November 13, 1606) was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 philologist and physician

Physician

A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...

, most famous for his work De Arte Gymnastica.

Biography

Born in the city of Forlì

Forlì

Forlì is a comune and city in Emilia-Romagna, Italy, and is the capital of the province of Forlì-Cesena. The city is situated along the Via Emilia, to the right of the Montone river, and is an important agricultural centre...

, the son of Giovanni Mercuriali, also a doctor, he was educated at Bologna

Bologna

Bologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of Northern Italy. The city lies between the Po River and the Apennine Mountains, more specifically, between the Reno River and the Savena River. Bologna is a lively and cosmopolitan Italian college city, with spectacular history,...

 and Padua

Padua

Padua is a city and comune in the Veneto, northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Padua and the economic and communications hub of the area. Padua's population is 212,500 . The city is sometimes included, with Venice and Treviso, in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area, having...

 and Venice, where he received his doctorate in 1555. Settling in his natal city, he was sent on a political mission to Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

. The pope at the time was Paul IV

Pope Paul IV

Pope Paul IV, C.R. , né Giovanni Pietro Carafa, was Pope from 23 May 1555 until his death.-Early life:Giovanni Pietro Carafa was born in Capriglia Irpina, near Avellino, into a prominent noble family of Naples...

.

In Rome, he made favorable contacts and had free access to the great libraries, where with sweeping enthusiasm, he studied the classical and medical literature of the Greeks and Romans. His studies of the attitudes of the ancients toward diet

Diet (nutrition)

In nutrition, diet is the sum of food consumed by a person or other organism. Dietary habits are the habitual decisions an individual or culture makes when choosing what foods to eat. With the word diet, it is often implied the use of specific intake of nutrition for health or weight-management...

, exercise and hygiene

Hygiene

Hygiene refers to the set of practices perceived by a community to be associated with the preservation of health and healthy living. While in modern medical sciences there is a set of standards of hygiene recommended for different situations, what is considered hygienic or not can vary between...

 and the use of natural methods for the cure of disease culminated in the publication of his De Arte Gymnastica (Venice

Venice

Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...

, 1569). With its explanations concerning the principles of physical therapy, it is considered the first book on sports medicine

Sports medicine

Sports medicine is a branch of medicine that deals with physical fitness, treatment and prevention of injuries related to sports and exercise...

. The illustrations which accompanied the second edition of the work (1573) proved incredibly fertile to the Western imagination regarding the nature of athletics in the Classical world. Modern scholarship has recognized that these illustrations were largely speculative creations of Mercuriale and his collaborators.
(It was not however the first Renaissance book about the benefits of exercise; Cristobal Méndez's Libro del Exercicio (1553), which was rediscovered in 1930, predates it by 16 years.)

The book De Arte Gymnastica gave Mercuriale fame. He was called to occupy the chair of practical medicine in Padua

Padua

Padua is a city and comune in the Veneto, northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Padua and the economic and communications hub of the area. Padua's population is 212,500 . The city is sometimes included, with Venice and Treviso, in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area, having...

 in 1569. During this time, he translated the works of Hippocrates

Hippocrates

Hippocrates of Cos or Hippokrates of Kos was an ancient Greek physician of the Age of Pericles , and is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine...

, and, armed with this knowledge, wrote De morbis cutaneis (1572), considered the first scientific tract on skin diseases; De morbis mulieribus ("On the diseases of women") (1582); De morbis puerorum ("On the diseases of children") (1583); De oculorum et aurium affectibus; and "Censura e dispositio operum Hippocratis" (Venice, 1583). In De morbis puerorum, Mercuriali observed contemporary trends in child-rearing. He wrote that women generally finished breastfeeding

Breastfeeding

Breastfeeding is the feeding of an infant or young child with breast milk directly from female human breasts rather than from a baby bottle or other container. Babies have a sucking reflex that enables them to suck and swallow milk. It is recommended that mothers breastfeed for six months or...

 an infant exclusively after the third month and entirely after around thirteen months.

In 1573, he was called to Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

 to treat the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II

Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor

Maximilian II was king of Bohemia and king of the Romans from 1562, king of Hungary and Croatia from 1563, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation from 1564 until his death...

. The emperor, pleased with the treatment he received (although he was to die three years later), made him an imperial count palatine

Count Palatine (Imperial)

The Imperial Count Palatine was a title revived by Emperor Charles IV which was based upon the former position of a Count Palatine in the royal court....

.

He returned home in the following years; in 1575, the Venetian Senate awarded him a six-year contract as a professor at the University of Padua

University of Padua

The University of Padua is a premier Italian university located in the city of Padua, Italy. The University of Padua was founded in 1222 as a school of law and was one of the most prominent universities in early modern Europe. It is among the earliest universities of the world and the second...

. Although he was largely hailed as a hero of the city, his reputation would take a sharp turn downwards after his inept handling of the outbreak of plague in Venice in 1576-1577. Mercuriale was summoned by the Venetian government to head a team of medical professionals who would advise about the disease. Arguing against the quarantining

Quarantine

Quarantine is compulsory isolation, typically to contain the spread of something considered dangerous, often but not always disease. The word comes from the Italian quarantena, meaning forty-day period....

 and use of lazaretto

Lazaretto

A lazaretto or lazaret is a quarantine station for maritime travellers. Lazarets can be ships permanently at anchor, isolated islands, or mainland buildings. Until 1908, lazarets were also used for disinfecting postal items, usually by fumigation...

s by the Board of Health, Mercuriale maintained that the disease infecting Venice could not possibly be plague. He and another medical professor, Girolamo Capodivacca, offered to personally treat the sick in Venice on the condition that the quarantines and other precautions put in place by the Board of Health be lifted. The professors and their assistants traveled freely between infected and safe houses, administering treatment, to the horror of the Board of Health and officials in Padua and surrounding cities, who worried the disease would spread. When Mercuriali and Capodivacca began their treatment of the sick in Venice, the death toll had come to a near halt—this was one of the reasons they believed it could not be the true plague. However, by the end of June, the month when they began their work, it rose at an incredible rate. By the beginning of July, the Senate ordered Mercuriale and Capodivacca to be quarantined themselves and it was largely believed that their questionable methods were at fault for the spread of the plague, which eventually claimed 50,000 Venetians.

However, Mercuriale salvaged his own reputation in the following years with the 1577 publication of De Pestilentia, his treatise about the plague, which had been delivered as a series of lectures at the University of Padua.

Mercuriale was a prolific writer, though many books were ascribed to him that were compiled from the works of others. He remained in Padua until 1587, when he began teaching at the University of Bologna. In 1593, he was called by Cosimo de' Medici

Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany

Cosimo I de' Medici was Duke of Florence from 1537 to 1574, reigning as the first Grand Duke of Tuscany from 1569.-Biography:...

, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, to Pisa

Pisa

Pisa is a city in Tuscany, Central Italy, on the right bank of the mouth of the River Arno on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It is the capital city of the Province of Pisa...

. Cosimo wanted to increase the prestige of the university there and offered a record salary of 1,800 gold crowns, to become 2,000 gold crowns after the second year.

Mercuriale returned to Forlì in 1606 and died there few months later.

Among his many disciples was the Swiss botanist Gaspard Bauhin

Gaspard Bauhin

Gaspard Bauhin, or Caspar Bauhin , was a Swiss botanist who wrote Pinax theatri botanici , which described thousands of plants and classified them in a manner that draws comparisons to the later binomial nomenclature of Linnaeus...

.

On 11 March 2009, the Olympic Museum in Lausanne hosted a colloquium given by the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of Girolamo Mercuriale.

Works

• Artis gymnasticae apud antiquos celeberrimae, nostris temporis ignoratae, libri sex. Venice, 1569. Critical Edition: Girolamo Mercuriale: De arte gymnastica. The Art of Gymnastics, ed., Concetta Pennuto; English trans. Vivian Nutton
  Vivian Nutton
  Vivian Nutton is a British historian of medicine and Professor at the UCL Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London.Nutton acquired a BA in Classics at Cambridge in 1965 and subsequently taught there as a Fellow of Selwyn College . He received his PhD in 1970...
  
  , Florence 2008 ISBN 978-88-222-5804-5
• De morbis cutaneis, et omnibus corporis humani excrementis tractatus locupletissimi..., Venice, 1572
• De pestilentia, Venice, 1577
• De morbis puerorum tractatus locupletissimi..., Venice, 1583
• De venenis, et morbis venenosis tractatus locupletissimi..., Venice, 1584
• De morbis muliebribus libri, Venice, 1587
• De venenis, et morbis venenosis tractatus locupletissimi, Venice, 1588
• De morbis puerorum tractatus locupletissimi, Venice, 1588
• Variarum lectionum, in medicinae scriptoribus & aliis, libri sex, 1598

External links

• Catholic Encyclopedia article
• DE HIERONYMI MERCURIALE VITA ET SCRIPTIS
• Full text De arte gymnastica
• http://www.digital-collections.de/index.html?c=autoren_index&l=en&ab=Mercuriale%2C+GirolamoWorks of Mercuriale at the Munich Digitization Center
  Munich Digitization Center
  Munich Digitization Center is an institution dedicated to digitalization, Online publication and the long-term archival preservation of the holdings of the Bavarian State Library and other cultural heritage institutions. It was founded in 1997 under the leadership of Mark Brantl...
  
  ]