Journal de la nutrition et des sciences alimentaires
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Food and Cancer Paduan Diets in Early Modern Times

Daniel Droixhe*

From the last third of the thirteenth century, an extensive literature of consilia developed in Italy. This ‘epistemic genre’ has been widely studied by Nancy G. Siraisi.A second investigator, Marilyn Nicoud, specifies that the genre ‘belongs to a class of texts which are clearly identified, particular and autonomous, even if it maintains close and sometimes ambiguous links with other genres, especially with diets and recipes for health’. ‘Generally, the consilia deal with a particular patient and a disease for which a physician from whom the advice has been sought proposes in writing specific types of care, often organized into three distinct parts: after a description of the symptoms allowing the formulation of a diagnosis (the casus), the treatmentconsists in a diet which is based on the ‘six non-natural things’ (diatea), followed by therapy using a pharmacopoeia (potio)’. Some of these consultations deal with ‘cancer’. In the present article, the nature of the disorders treated under this heading will not be given detailed consideration in terms of contemporary science. In considering the medieval terminology of the disease, Luke Demaitre notices its relative inconsistency: ‘one ailment could have several names, and one term could refer to widely varying conditions’. In his awesome book on Medieval Medicine. The Art of Healing from Head to Toe (2013), Demaitre methodically considers the lack of distinction among several diseases by ‘early Latin compilers, including Copho, Gariopontus, Petrocellu, John of Sint Paul, and other Salernitan masters’. A confusion was especially fostered between cancer and cancrena or gangrene as they were supposed to be due to an excess of yellow bile, according to Avicenna. For example, in the Breviarium attributed to the famous Arno of Vilanova (c. 1240-1311), a chapter is entitled ‘On fistulas, cancer, lupus, and the like’. Demaitre’s approach to the question of the real diseases with which are dealing the consilia will be adopted, when he explores these notions ‘with an eye on their medical implications for the time’ and ‘on the attitudes evoked in definitions and analogies, rather than on their closeness to the latest perspective on modern mentalités and mythologies of cancer’. The elements allowing us to make some circumstantial remarks about the disorders will be treated the same way. Alongside this literature of personal consultations, a literature of compendia or theoreticae included substantial treatises which sometimes contained chapters on ‘cancer’. These two types of books developed especially in Padua, where, as Vivian Nutton has written, ‘Europe’s leading medical faculty’ was located.