Pharmacological Treatment of Postprandial Reductions in Blood Pressure : A Systematic Review

Funded by The Dunhill Medical Trust. Grant Number: RTF14/0110Peer reviewedPostprin

Just the Tonic: A Natural History of Tonic Water, by Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt London: Kew, 2019

Review of Just the Tonic: A Natural History of Tonic Water, by Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt (London: Kew Publishing, 2019

"All that pertains to medicine": protomedici and protomedicati in early modern Italy.

In 1621 the vice-protomedico of the Papal States was arrested while inspecting an apothecary's shop and charged with committing financial irregularities in the course of his duties. Giacomo Giacobelli had received his doctorate in 1598 and, in addition to being physician at St John Lateran in Rome, was serving for the third time as vice-protomedico. As Giacobelli told the judges of the Apostolic Chamber, his authority as vice-protomedico in the Papal States outside Rome was analogous to the protomedico's power within the city. © 1994, Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved

The cistern-system of early modern Venice: technology, politics and culture in a hydraulic society

At a time when European cities depended on three sources of fresh water for their domestic and industrial needs – rivers, spring-fed aqueducts and groundwater wells – early modern Venice added a fourth possibility: a dense network of cisterns for capturing, filtering and storing rainwater. Venice was not unique in relying on rainwater cisterns; but nowhere in Italy (indeed in Europe) was the approach so systematic and widespread, the city concerned so populous, the technology so sophisticated and the management so carefully regulated as in the lagoon city. To explore Venice's cisternsystem, a range of primary sources (medical treatises, travellers’ accounts, archival records) and the contributions of architectural, medical and social historians, and archaeologists are analysed. The article examines the system’s functioning and management, including the role of the city’s acquaroli or watermen; the maintenance of freshwater quality throughout the city, in the context of broader sanitation measures; and the place of the “wells” and freshwater in daily life in Venice. As a means of teasing out the myriad links between nature, technology and society in early modern Italy, the article concludes with a brief comparison of the politics of water supply management in the very different urban realities of (republican) Venice, (viceregal) Naples and (papal) Rome

“Cool and tasty waters”: managing Naples’s water supply, c. 1500–c. 1750

Although Naples was one of Europe’s largest cities (after London and Paris), studies of the management of its water supply during the early modern period are sorely lacking, despite growing interest in the subject at both an Italian and European level. Naples was perhaps unique in relying on a vast and tortuous underground network of reservoirs, cisterns, channels and conduits, accessed by well shafts, all fed by an ancient aqueduct. The present study outlines and evaluates the Neapolitan water supply as it existed in the period, analysing the archival records of the municipal tribunal responsible for the city’s infrastructure, the ‘Tribunale della Fortificazione, Acqua e Mattonata’, and its various ‘Appuntamenti’ (proposals), ‘Conclusioni’ (decisions) and edicts. This is interwoven with reference to pertinent printed accounts, from contemporary guide books to medical regimens and health manuals. We examine both water quantity, in terms of availability and accessibility (by looking at the structure and its management, and the technicians responsible for its maintenance) and water quality (by looking at contemporary attitudes and perceptions). In the process we are able to question the widespread view of early modern Naples as chaotic and uncontrolled, governed by a weak public authority, as well as widely held assumptions about the “inertia” of the pre-modern hydro-social system more generally

Melissa Calaresu and Helen Hills, eds, New Approaches to Naples, c. 1500–c.1800: The Power of Place, Ashgate: Farnham, 2013; 286 pp., 7 colour plates, 38 b/w illus.; 9781409429432, £70.00 (hbk)

It’s a bit like waiting for the bus: you wait twenty-five years for an English-language collection of essays on early modern Naples and then two are published in close succession. In fact, the last such edited volume was Good Government in Spanish Naples, edited by Antonio Calabria and John Marino (New York 1990). If that collection focused on the political, administrative and social structures of the king- dom of Naples, the two recently published volumes show a significant evolution of historiographical concerns among the editors and contributors. They do so in dif- ferent ways. Tommaso Astarita’s Companion to Early Modern Naples (Leiden 2013) was a scholarly tour de force of 500 pages and 20 distinct contributions (including my own, so I must state an interest here) on a vast range of topics. New Approaches to Naples is on a somewhat more modest scale, but is certainly none the worse for that. A few historians have contributed to both volumes, such as Anna Maria Rao and Melissa Calaresu, while the late John Marino was a trait d’union to all three books: an indication of his importance to the field