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The Renaissance Nose Job
THE RAVAGES OF WARFARE, PUBLIC VIOLENCE, AND DISFIGURING NEW DISEASES made the Renaissance an age of surgical innovation, and professor of secrets Leonardo Fioravanti was a witness to one of the most amazing innovations of all: Surgical reconstruction of the nose, known in medical terms as rhinoplasty . It’s a pretty amazing story in itself. […]
Advance Notices of “The Professor of Secrets”
It’s fun to read reviews of your books–provided they are favorable. Here’s the first advance review of The Professor of Secrets that I have seen. It’s by Nick Owchar of the Los Angeles Times: William Eamon also brings a distant world up close in “The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance Italy” […]
“With the Rules of Life and an Enema”: Alternative Medicine and the Way of Nature
Not so long ago, “alternative medicine”—a heterogeneous mélange of healing practices that includes everything from herbalism to acupuncture—was regarded as nothing more than a relic of medicine’s prescientific past or, worse, a cultish fad. That is hardly the case any longer. Each year, millions of Americans use some form of alternative medicine. In fact, according […]
Labyrinth of Nature
Albert Einstein famously told a story about how, when he was a child, his father showed him a compass. Looking at the strange instrument, the boy trembled and grew cold. At that moment, Einstein realized something that would propel him in all of his scientific endeavors: it was the realization that nature held secrets. In […]
Coming Soon: “The Professor of Secrets”
I am pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of my new book, The Professor of Secrets. Set in sixteenth-century Italy, the book tells the story of Leonaro Fioravanti, who rose from obscurity to become the first “celebrity” doctor of the early modern age. A brilliant, forward-thinking, and utterly unconventional doctor, Fioravanti had a talent for […]
