The French Pox in the 16th Century Medical Consilia

Summary: Consilia played an important role in medieval but also early modern professional health literature. Literary "consilium" contained a written statement of one particular case, the patient's condition and disease as well as advice on a medical procedure where a doctor in accordance with the contemporary discourse analyzed symptoms, determined the diagnosis, prognosis and recommended its pharmacological treatment including possible technical interventions (venesection etc.). In the 16th century, the Consilia Literature was a common part of many eminent physicians' practice whereas nowadays it is unjustly neglected source of history of medicine, pharmacology, dietetics and so on. The first part of the dissertation is devoted to the definition of genre, the initial stages of its development and description of the specifics of the Middle Ages. However the results of fifteen eminent physicians of Italy (B. Vettori, G. B. Da Monte, V. Trincavelli, A. M. Venusti, G. Capodivaccio, C. Guarinoni), France (J. Fernel, G. de Baillou) and of the German-speaking areas of Central Europe (J. Crato, R. Solenander, L. Scholz, D. Cornarius, J. Wittich, T. Mermann, J. Matthaeus), became the main theme of work of early modern consultative collections. On examination of nearly seven thousand consilia from twenty two..