Finding a cure
- Medicine Bottle in Decameron
The novellas of the Decameron occur during the Black Death plague in Florence in 1348. Boccaccio starts his masterpiece with a description of this awful situation. Throughout the novellas he describes how medical events were viewed at that time: oftentimes they were considered the cause of a patient’s mental state. We have various examples: in the seventh novella of the second day, a man suffers weight loss because he cannot confess his love. The doctor in this novella is not able to find a physical cause. The death of Lisabetta da Messina is also caused by emotional suffering: she dies of grief from the loss of her lover and the pot of basil in which she had buried his head. In Calandrino’s case, he feels sick, because the doctor and his friends tell him he is. It is the blind trust that Boccaccio is satirizing. Boccaccio’s skepticism can be seen as a prelude to the humanistic ideal: man is the center of the universe, there is no after-life or supernatural reality and reason provides human beings with knowledge and morality.Encyclopedia Britannica, “History of magic in Western worldviews”
The novellas of the Decameron occur during the Black Death plague in Florence in 1348. Boccaccio starts his masterpiece with a description of this awful situation. Throughout the novellas he describes how medical events were viewed at that time: oftentimes they were considered the cause of a patient’s mental state. We have various examples: in the seventh novella of the second day, a man suffers weight loss because he cannot confess his love. The doctor in this novella is not able to find a physical cause. The death of Lisabetta da Messina is also caused by emotional suffering: she dies of grief from the loss of her lover and the pot of basil in which she had buried his head. In Calandrino’s case, he feels sick, because the doctor and his friends tell him he is. It is the blind trust that Boccaccio is satirizing. Boccaccio’s skepticism can be seen as a prelude to the humanistic ideal: man is the center of the universe, there is no after-life or supernatural reality and reason provides human beings with knowledge and morality.
Medicinal products with a positive effect have a limited role in the Decameron. Even though one third of the novellas in the Decameron contain medical content, there are only two novella’s that portray a doctor as a true specialist.
Throughout the Decameron, we do see various cases of suicide by poisoning. In the first novella of the fourth day, Ghismunda takes her own life by drinking a distillation made from poisonous herbs and roots. In the seventh novella of the same day, Pasquino and Simona lose their sight, have difficulty speaking and eventually die because they rubbed a leaf of sage against their teeth.9
These examples show that many people at that time had access to and knowledge of poisonous herbs. This knowledge was usually not based on science and mainly based on superstition.8 That doesn’t mean, however, that all medicine from medieval ages can be considered quackery. In fact, 18th century scientists discovered that some of the medical products used in the Middle Ages did actually work. A famous example is digitalis
Today, many people believe in science and rationality instead of magic or superstition. But isn’t it true that whenever someone (for example, a certain president of a certain country) claims to have found a medicine for a world-wide virus for which there is not yet a cure, many people are still willing to try it out? And how about the placebo effects? It looks like Boccaccio, through the writing of the Decameron, has managed to point out an issue that we can relate to in our current society, even after all these centuries: belief and faith can easily be used against people, so it’s always necessary to remain critical towards your sources.