Sul filo dei segreti medicinali: praticanti e professionisti del mercato della cura a Venezia (secoli XVI-XVIII)

The purpose of the research are the medicines and remedies (“secrets”) patented by Venetian Health authorities to 375 among physicians, apothecaries, grocers, practitioners etc. (except “charlatans”, already well explored) in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Venice. In the first part we analyse the development of the regulatory framework from 1549 to 1798, dates of first and last licence for secrets. Development that highlights how the secrets manipulators are not exclusively charlatans, as most of the academic studies support, but they belong to various professional groups, defining them more and more minutely over the years. The manipulation of remedies and medicines is part of the care market, sharing a peculiar feature with the Venetian pharmacopoea: the lack of a binding pharmaceutical code, exciting a great deal of inventivness and above all a good tendency to chemical studies, usually avoided from the official pharmacopoeias. The central part of the research tries to reconstruct, to the extent permitted by sources, the socio-cultural background inducing the secrets manipulators to engage in naturalistic and chemical studies. We browse then a series of case studies along the XVI-XVIII centuries, concernig professionals and non professionals, inserting them in the local tradition of chemical, botanical and pharmaceutical tradition. The third part of the research is devoted to the last flowering of secrets, the late seventeenth-century one, when many features mature: the pursuit of therapeutical sweetness, together with a noninvasive therapeutical impact and the tendency to build large commercial networks. From the sixteenth century, among the manipulators of secrets, apothecaries are the most increasing group of professionals, facilitated by Health authorities that want to bring the care market back into the medicine shops. This is the twilight of the medicinal secrets: creativity of professionals and practitioners is shrinking day by day, while authorities are creating an increasingly widespread system of socio-cultural disciplining.