Silvia De Renzi

Abstract

Orifices were prominent in early modern healing practices because they connected the inside of the body with the outside, for example, as channels through which to remove harmful matter. But they could become clogged, develop pathological growths or let out what should stay inside. The resulting inflamed veins, hernias or prolapses were the remit of surgeons, whose varied interventions and forms of education historians are reassessing. This article examines how orifices, in particular anuses and genitals, were depicted in a set of plates produced in Rome in the 1660s that was linked to surgeon Guglielmo Riva’s teaching activities. While placing these pictures within pedagogical techniques and the changing visual tradition of surgical operations to which they belonged, I explore how the male trainee surgeons would have received the most graphic images. Drawing on studies of early modern visual culture and the history of male sociability, I reconstruct the overlapping meanings that the pictures could have acquired. I argue that their instructions for how to intervene on male bodies were framed by concerns about sodomy, which, while probably common, in early modern Rome was also closely policed, not least using surgeons’ medico-legal advice. By contrast, the pictures also shared in the long-standing association of orifices with carnivalesque humour. While some visual strategies might have been adopted to minimise that, entertainment was integral to education. When contextualised both in their visual and medical tradition and the social and cultural frames in which they were received, these images of orifices enrich our understanding of premodern perceptions of bodies and their boundaries.

Keywords: surgical education, seventeenth-century Rome, sodomy, surgical pictures, representations of anuses and penises, Guglielmo Riva, orifices

Full text: Picturing Bodies_6_De Renzi

DOI: 10.5456/issn.2050-3679/2025w00

Biographical note 
Silvia De Renzi is a historian of early modern medicine in the History Department of The Open University. Silvia is completing a monograph on physicians in Counter Reformation Rome and how they responded to the demands made of their knowledge, at the bedside and in society at large. She is the co-editor of Pathology in Practice: Diseases and Dissections in Early Modern Europe (Routledge 2018). She has published on the history of legal medicine, early modern hospitals and surgeons’ education.