Renaissance Studies Vol. 15 No. 2 Country medicine in the city marketplace: snakehandlers as itinerant healers KATHARINE PARK Historians of Renaissance medicine tend to study urban medicine in isola- tion from the countryside, or - when and if we look at healing in country and village life at all - to treat it as isolated, separate, a foil to conditions in the city. But the city wall, though an important juridical boundary, was in other respects highly permeable, perforated by gates through which hundreds of people passed every day. City and countryside were a single, larger system, interdependent not only socially, economically, and militarily, but also in terms of health care. People flowed through the city gates in both directions in search of healing. City folk, mostly patricians), sought the healthy air of the countryside, particularly in the summer, and the thera- peutic action of local healing springs.’ Country folk, mostly labourers, sought the medical services of the city’s hospitals, and the same hospitals constituted a large and insatiable market for rural produce - not only food for their inmates, but cartloads of medicinal plant and animal products, from charcoal to chamomile to leeches.*Finally, healers passed through the gates in both directions. At least in Tuscany, municipal surgeons and physicians retained to treat the poor had responsibility for inhabitants of the countryside, and one Florentine hernia surgeon spent so much time travelling in the countryside that he petitioned successfully for relief from city taxes.% This paper, however, focuses on healers who moved through the gates in the other direction - people from the country who came to the city - and one group of healers in particular: men known for their ability to cure the bites of snakes and other poisonous reptiles. This group included, among others, the men who came in the late fifteenth century to be called puuliuni, or ‘of the Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Department of the History and Sociology of Medicine of McGill University, University of Pennsylvania/Princeton University Joint Colloquium in the History of Science, and the Colloquium of the Science, Technology and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in addition to the Warburg/Wellcome conference; 1 am grateful to the participants for their comments and suggestions. ’ See, e.g., D. S. Chambers, ‘Spas in the Italian Renaissance’, in Mario A. Di Cesare (ed.), Reconsidering fhr Renaissance (Binghamton, NY, 1992), 3-27. * See Katharine Park, ‘Hospitals and medical assistance in Renaissance Florence’, in Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones (eds), Medicine and Charify before Lhe Wel/re Sfafe (London, 1991). 26-45. ’ Archivio di Stat0 di Firenze, Provvisioni-Registri 85, 122’-123‘ (26June 1396); Katharine Park, Doclors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Flurence (Princeton, 1985), 96. 0 2001 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Oxford Univenity Press