Bartolotti, Gian Giacomo

(b. Parma, Italy, ca. 1470; d. after 1530)

medicine, history of medicine.

Bartolotti came from a family of doctors; his father, Pellegrino, was competent in both pharmacy and surgery. Gian Giacomo studied philosophy and medicine at the universities of Bologna and Ferrara; at the latter he was a pupil of Antonio Cittadini and of Sebastiano Dell’Aquila, both of secondary importance in the medical ranks of Ferrara. He was there in 1494, among those who witnessed the conferring of degrees, and in 1497 he attended an anatomical dissection. A year later, although not included on the list of professors holding regular appointments at Ferrara, he was assigned to teach a course on the fourth “fen” of the first book of the Canon of Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna). He prefaced the course with a series of historical lessons that he also used as an introduction to his Opusculum de antiquitate medicinae. Toward the close of the century he was practicing medicine, and in the early sixteenth century he was doing so at Venice.

In 1758 Mazzuchelli revealed an Italian translation that Bartolotti had made of the Table (Pinax), a dialogue attributed to Cebes, the Theban philosopher who was a disciple of Socrates and Philolaus.

In his Opusculum de antiquitate medicinae, a brief treatise on the history of ancient medicine, Bartolotti exhibits praiseworthy zeal, even though the work is based on obvious critical naïveté regarding historicalscientific orientation of the ancient period. Nevertheless, he reveals a good knowledge of classical medical literature, and in the early chapters he analyzes the origins of medical thought.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. MS of Cebe’s Table, translated into the vernacular at the request of Niccolò Maria d’Este bishop of Adria, is preserved in the Library of the Somaschi Fathers of the Salute in Venice, Codex Vaticanus 288, and bears the notation “Ferrariae 1498, die 28. Aprilis.” Opusculum de antiquitate medicinae, Codex Vaticanus 5376, was translated, along with introduction, into English by Dorothy M. Schullian and, in the same volume, into Italian by Luigi Belloni (Milan, 1954). Mention must also be made of Tractatus de natura daemonum (1498) and Tractatus complessionum (1520), which are in the MS Vaticanus latinus 5376.

II. Secondary Literature. Mention of Bartolotti may be found in I. Affo, Memorie degli scrittori e letterati parmigiani (Parma, 1791), pp. 178–179; and G. M. Mazzuchelli, Gli scrittori d’Italia, II, pt. 1 (Brescia, 1758), 479.

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