Marsilio Ficino completed the third part of his De vita libri tres, titled De vita coelitus comparanda, in July of 1489; by the fall of that year he felt obliged to write an Apologia on behalf of his new book. Though it was destined to be the most popular of his original works, this analysis and defense of astrological magic and medicine caused Ficino worry from the moment of its composition. The Apology shows that he was particularly anxious about the religious orthodoxy of De vita III, among whose readers he expected to find many ignorant critics and some malignant:

We are accustomed to thinking of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) as the great Renaissance champion of Plato from a Christian point of view and the leader of those who wished to effect an accommodation between Platonism (or more accurately Neoplatonism) and Christianity, as the most distinguished of Plato's several Medicean apologists. Many texts lend credibility to this interpretation of Ficino's goals, and it is essentially correct. However, it is important that we appreciate just where he traced the boundaries of accommodation between Catholic dogma and what he regarded as authentic Platonism; and in particular that we appreciate the care and circumspection with which he approached the problem of analyzing the relationship between the dogma of the Trinity and the various texts in Plato that lent themselves to a trinitarian interpretation that Plato himself could not have intended or even fully conceived.

The following brief reflections on the present state of scholarship in Renaissance medicine make no claim to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. Medicine is of broad historical interest because a web of connections link it to the culture as a whole. Variously considered, medicine has a place in the history of science and technology, in social history, and in a wide sweep of cultural and intellectual history ranging from the history of philosophy to the study of popular mentalités. Moreover, although the field of the history of Renaissance medicine is one in which much, including fundamental work, remains to be done, it is also one that is now being vigorously developed in some widely diverse ways. Confronted with this breadth of topics and materials, I am seeking only to isolate a few major directions in current work