This work offers a critical edition and German translation of Gabriele Zerbi's De cautelis medicorum (On rules of caution for physicians). Published in sixteen folios in 1495 or shortly thereafter, the work focuses on the comportment that will enhance the physician's standing as a valued member of the learned elite. While it addresses themes related to modern medical ethics, the book is also valuable as a reflection of the pressures and dilemmas that European physicians encountered at the turn of the sixteenth century.
Gabriele Zerbi was a leading physician who published important works on diseases of the elderly (Gerontocomia, 1489) and anatomy (Liber anathomiae corporis humani, 1502). Born in Verona, Zerbi taught at the University of Bologna and practiced in Rome before taking a post in 1494 to teach theoretical medicine at the University of Padua. While in Rome, Zerbi served Pope Sixtus V and he was so esteemed that, in 1503, he was sent to Florence to tend to the illness of Lorenzino de’ Medici. De cautelis medicorum thus reflects the experience of a practitioner who navigated among extremely powerful clients. Throughout the work, and especially in the preface, Zerbi adopts a protective stance: beset on all sides by rivals and threats to his reputation, the physician must be judicious and prudent, avoiding dishonorable behavior at all costs. Zerbi's biography indicates the high stakes and even the perils of his professional milieu. Summoned in 1505 to treat the Ottoman governor of Bosnia, Zerbi was murdered along with his son when the governor died after his visit.
Broadly speaking, the six chapters of Zerbi's treatise fall into two sections that address the physician's development and behavior in practice. The first three chapters outline aspects of the ideal physician's training and general attitude. Zerbi commends rigorous reading from an early age and bedside teaching in a hospitalia; admonishes the physician to attribute successful healing to God; and extols the necessity of a virtuous character. Following his contemporary Pietro Abano (d. 1316), Zerbi cautions that this last attribute could not be taken for granted since most physicians were born under the astrological signs of Mars or Scorpio. The last three chapters offer more specific prescriptions for the physician's conduct with patients, people attending the patient, and in the wider world. In the wide-ranging chapter concerning patients, Zerbi urges a restrained approach to prognosis, cautions against acceptance of difficult cases that might damage one's reputation, and discourages lawsuits to obtain a fee.
The work's organization and prescriptions hew closely to the works of ancient authors, especially the Hippocratic Oath and the Laws, and Zerbi liberally references earlier medieval authorities, including Joannes Mesue, Haly Abbas, and Ibn Sina. As noted in the editors’ introduction, Zerbi appropriated substantial material directly from the Sermones medicinales that were published by the Florentine medical professor Niccolò Falcucci in 1491 (23–24). Although Zerbi's reflections were (by design) not novel, his reputation may have ensured a wide audience for the work. De cautelis medicorum appeared in at least six different editions between ca. 1495 and 1528—copies of other editions may have been lost—and it was consulted by physicians throughout Italy and in Austria and Hungary. The treatise was printed several times in conjunction with a well-known pharmacological compendium, the Pillularum of Pantaleone da Confienza, which positioned Zerbi's work in the orbit of everyday practice.
The translation of this important text is enhanced by a fulsome introduction that introduces Zerbi's life and the prior scholarship on De cautelis medicorum. The original Latin is presented with the German translation on opposing pages. Footnotes indicate variant texts in the five other known editions and chart the relationships between Zerbi's text, Falcucci's work, and other classical and medieval writings. Completed with a bibliography and index of names, nothing lacks in this excellent volume for historians of medicine, or any scholar concerned with early European printed texts. Zerbi's work was also translated into Italian in 1963: an English version of the entire treatise would be most welcome, and this volume is an exemplary model.
