Skin on Trial: Experts and Expertise on ‘Skin Diseases’ in Early Modern Italy

By using both static or normative documents (licenses, official regulations, barber-surgeon’s manuals) and more dynamic sources (trials of the Protomedicato), my essay asks what was an expert on skin diseases in early modern Italy and how the loose category of “skin diseases” came into being under the influence of medical theory, surgical practice, patient demand, and civic regulation of medical practice. I argue that by the late seventeenth century “skin disease” became an independent category, the surface of the body an independent object, and the empiric surgeon an expert of such surface. As human skin as a surface acquired autonomy as an object of knowledge and practice, a class of experts emerged following a path which is in large measure independent from the transformations of Galenic theoretical medicine and the rise of mechanistic medicine which are typically described as central in this period. I argue that empirical surgeons and barber-surgeons became experts on skin through the licensing system and by inverting the classical path of medical knowledge – not from the inner body to its surface as manifestation of internal humoral imbalances, but rather from the surface to the knowledge and the treatment of the inner body.