THE EXPERIENCE OF THE PHYSICIAN GIROLAMO DONZELLINI IN THE 1575 VENETIAN PLAGUE: BETWEEN SCIENTIA AND HETERODOXY

The paper examines the 1575 Venetian plague, by taking into account the personal and scientific experience of the heterodox physician working in the Republic, Girolamo Donzellini, a very wellknown medical doctor and humanist in what he himself defined the sixteenth- century Respublica Medicorum.1 During the pestilence, he was serving an Inquisition life sentence in prison, and it was precisely because of the medical activity he provided in this tragic situation that he was able to re-gain freedom. As a heterodox doctor, a prisoner and the author of a treatise on plague, he provides a good case-study to frame the rise of medicine as a Scientia against a very tangible context: one made of cells, corpses, and pages secretly written under the first lights of the day.