"The Root is Hidden and the Material Uncertain": the challenges of prosecuting witchcraft in early modern Venice.

The rich archival records of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Venice have yielded much information about early modern society and culture. The transcripts of witchcraft trials held before the Inquisition reveal the complexities of early modern conceptions of natural and supernatural. The tribunal found itself entirely unable to convict individuals charged with performing harmful magic, or maleficio, as different worldviews clashed in the courtroom. Physicians, exorcists, and inquisitors all had different approaches to distinguishing natural phenomena from supernatural, and without a consensus guilty verdicts could not be obtained.

[Surgical practice in the Mexican Empire]. / El ejercicio de la cirugía en el imperio mexica.

The prehispanic medicines of Mexico are considered as testimony of the splendor of the Meso-American cultures; their great scientific advance and technical allowed them to accumulate a vast collection of clinical and pathological data based on the observation and experimentation. They integrated a nomenclature medical surgical that reflected their advance in those fields of the knowledge, where the anatomy and surgery occupied a preponderant paper. The medicine was known generically as ticiotl, of where it derives the term tícitl for the doctor. In their concept health-illness the limits among the magic, religion and the empiricism for natural causes were not clear, therefore they considered that the divine, human or natural origin of the illnesses influenced in an important way in its nature. Inside this complex causal system, the illnesses caused by the gods, spirits and celestial beings were considered as hot, while those caused by beings of the other realm were cold. The practice of the medicine had a very established organization designing a very advanced system of specialties that allowed them to accumulate a vast experience for the handling of chronic and acute illnesses in different progression phases, which managed with an integral therapy that had a plurality of resources of vegetable origin, animal, and mineral. The surgery was designated as texoxotlaliztli and its cures tepatiliztli. The surgeon was designated as texoxotlaticitl and it developed advanced techniques in the handling of sutures, wounded, drainage of abscesses, fractures and joint dislocations, pterygium, tonsillitis, circumcision, and amputations.

[The Paduan doctor Alessandro Pellati, his library and the first edition of De medicorum astrologia]. / Il dottore padovano Alessandro Pellati, la sua biblioteca e l'editio princeps del De medicorum astrologia.

The article prints the text of a document in the Archivio di Stato, Venice, comprising a list of books intended for auction, with an estimate of their value. THey constitute the private library of Alessandro Pellati (d. 1487), a Paduan doctor about whom nothing is known, except his name appears in the colophon of the first edition of a short treatise attributed to Hippocrates, the De medicorum astrologia seu de esse aegrorum, translated into Latin and published in Padua in 1483. The considerable number of astrological works in his library show that Pellati was keenly interested in the subject which, under the title of "natural magic", had assumed a significant place in medical studies at that time, particularly in Padua.