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There are references to poxes and bloodletting elsewhere in The Alchemist, but Jonson uses the ordinary experience of barbering, and the familiar relationship between barber and patient, to ponder the dangers of the razor. By way of that razor, the scene highlights the problem of trust between these tricksters. Note that Face needs a shave but that he acknowledges the potential dangers of his cohort’s touch. Can he trust Subtle? Specifically, can he trust Subtle’s touch and his use of the blade? Or, in Face’s words, ‘And not cut my throat, but trim me?’ Although the play conducts us through urban marketplaces, alchemical fantasies, the laboratory and vice, Jonson evokes a medical setting and the familiar encounter between barber and patient (client) to present a highly charged moment of estrangement and negotiation. Barbering was ordinary, a part of hygiene and a means for securing health.2 But in this newly competitive environment of the marketplace, both the relation between barber and patient and the activities of the barber are potentially transformed.

Howard Adelmann’s majestic five volume Marcello Malpighi and the Evolution of Embryology was published nearly 50 years ago. A mix of paraphrase and translation, as well as extended commentary, Adelmann described Malpighi as “one of the cardinal figures in the history of biology. As we look back over the three centuries that separate him from us, he may, for all his towering stature, at first glance seem a distant figure. And yet he and his work are not so remote after all” (Vol. 1, xxii). Much has changed in the history of biology since Adelmann’s groundbreaking work, and among the many lessons to be taken from Domenico Bertoloni-Meli’s carefully researched, persuasive and, at times, beautifully rendered book is that the life sciences in the early modern period must be studied with an eye to the history of science, medicine and philosophy—i.e., calling Malpighi simply a “biologist” is very liable to mislead. This point, though only implicit in Meli’s choice to study Malpighi “in relation to the medico-anatomical world of his time” (4), indicates the interdisciplinary character of Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-Century Anatomy.

This essay explores the increasingly visible or strong relationship between educated surgeons and artisans that can be documented in vernacular translations of Latin surgery texts in the sixteenth century. We often consider the vernacular as a tool for broad dissemination, but vernacular translation was used by educated surgeons for more calculated, professional reasons. In vernacular texts, they began to articulate their role and responsibilities in urban settings (rather than military settings). This essay focuses on the Latin and Italian surgery texts of Giovanni Andrea della Croce, a Venetian, educated surgeon, who began to frame (in text and image) his work according to aspects of artisanal traditions.

By the second half of the sixteenth century, anatomy had become a conflicted resource for surgeons. Emphasized in a clinical context, anatomical experience was connected not only to less error, but to a practitioner’s violent approach to the living body of the patient. Taking the case study of two practitioners in late sixteenth-century Venice, this essay explores the problem of anatomy and the emergence of a more robust language of manual skill, with terms drawn from the visual arts.