I hated history in school. Why were we leaning about these kings and such? Who cares who used to be a ruler and what they did? Why should those people be important to me, a non-member of the ruling class?

Of course this attitude, aside from making me almost fail, was defensive on my part. I was a rebel, against the establishment. But also it goes toward how history was taught. Our high school American History text was titled "Story of a Free People." I didn't feel all that free, forced to attend classes and do homework. I just knew that I was being advertised to by my school, told what to believe by people with a stake in it under the guise of education. I didn't understand about culture and didn't realize that history was about times when different norms prevailed. If my teachers understood it, they sure didn't know how to teach it.

Now, I love history, but more cultural history than political. It gives me perspective on the now (a "distant mirror" you might call it.) They say history is written by the winners but this book is about a loser. He wasn't so much a loser in his time, but now is seen (if seen at all) to have been on the wrong side of history, a cliche that sums up my earlier history hate in that it's written to justify ourselves, presumed on the right side.

Leonardo Fioravanti, seen from a contemporary perspective, was a quack who sold false cures to the suffering for his own benefit. He had no humility and never missed an opportunity to promote himself. But is he that different from today's citizens who lie on resumes to get jobs? How about those who hire pr firms, or advertise that "Coke adds life"? As for his false cures, there were no real cures back then, but there was an "establishment" who "protected" the public by reserving the right to treat illness for themselves. Leonardo was their opponent, seeing himself as a reformer, not a quack.

The Renaissance was about rediscovering the wisdom of the ancients. The idea of progress in knowledge was still suspect. Was there truth outside the revealed word of God? Or Aristotle? What was needed was the spiritual and intellectual maturity to be open to it. "Empiricism" was a dirty word. All the theory one needed was known by those who were willing and able to study it. Knowledge was a matter of possessing secrets, closely guarded because of there being no intellectual property law at the time. The nearest thing to an Internet was the printing press (pre-movable type), but literacy wasn't widespread.

Fioravanti's idea of medicine was that Nature (with an upper case 'N') knows how to cure and that we must emulate it. Disease was corruption and cure was a return to purity. We still advertise products as "all natural" so this trope persists, but we've moved on to the idea of "science" as the arbiter of truth. Those who claim the intellectual high ground call themselves scientific but that includes creation science, Christian science, and scientific psychology (which is still largely tied to Behaviorism). Certain psychotherapists like to claim their work (they don't use the word "cure" too often anymore) is "evidence based" to distinguish themselves from those with techniques based on the authority of Freud. In the end, in the absence of an accepted theory of mental health (even the concept of mental health can be controversial, e.g. see Thomas Szasz) must we rely on user reviews from Yelp? If so, remember that Fioravanti had many who felt cured praising his treatments to the skies. (Possibly his failures all died.)

Keep in mind we also have those who question science--e.g. anti-vaxxers or climate change & evolution deniers, and even those who market alternative histories, Holocaust deniers, 911 truthers. Democracy and the marketplace (as they are called by their champions) can win out over "elites." Is our time so different from the past? We like to think of ourselves as rational and in control. We like to think the germ theory of disease is the end of the medical theoretical journey. Yes, the way we think now has given us air conditioning, though there are some claim the moon landing was faked. Science doesn't always progress. The cure for scurvy was actually forgotten for years and had to be rediscovered. What will happen when antibiotics stop working due to over use (the marketplace currently "votes" against developing new ones) or when we run out of fossil fuels? The recent ebola scare shows that society doesn't always react rationally to medical emergencies.

This book could be a much needed medicine for the disease of 21st century Western cultural absolutism but, after reading some of the other reviews herein, I fear too many have already built up a paradigmatic resistance to treatment.




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