Girolamo Manfredi’s Plague Treatise: Individualized Cures and Prevention for the Masses and Elites

Manfredi’s Treatise on Plague reflects the academic culture of Italy and reveals continuities with plague treatises written in the 14th century. The preface points to rivalries among various kinds of healers in Renaissance Italy, where learned physicians trained in scholastic disputations competed with empirics, and where professors like Manfredi emphasized that the mathematical practices of astrologers complement medical theory.