THE SCENE: Renaissance medicine sounds surprisingly mature and sophisticated in the passage below, where a doctor explains to a family both the nature of the ailment and the risks involved in the cure.
THE TEXT: It happened that a man with a diseased leg was placed under the doctor’s care. Having examined the ailment, the doctor informed the man’s kinsfolk that unless he removed a gangrenous bone in the patient’s leg, it would have to be amputated altogether; otherwise he would die. At the same time, while the removal of the bone offered every chance of a cure, there was no guarantee that the operation would be successful. The man’s family accepted the surgeon’s advice along with the reservations he had expressed, and handed the patient into his keeping.
The operation was to be performed toward evening, and that same morning, realizing that the invalid would be unable to withstand the pain unless he were doped beforehand, the doctor issued a special prescription providing for the distillation of a certain liquid which he intended to administer to the patient in order to put him to sleep for as long as the pain and the operation where likely to last.
– Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 14th Century AD
