The Book of Madness and Cures

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Gabriella Mondini is a rarity in 16th century Venice: a woman who practices medicine. Her father, a renowned physician, has provided her entree to this all male profession, and inspired in her a shared mission to understand the secrets of the human body. Then her father disappears and Gabriella faces a crisis: she is no longer permitted to treat her patients, women who need her desperately, without her father's patronage. She sets out across Europe to find where and why he has gone. Following clues from his occasional enigmatic letters, Gabriella crosses Switzerland, Germany and France, entering strange and forbidding cities. She travels to Scotland, the Netherlands, and finally to Morocco. In each new land she probes the mystery of her father's flight, and opens new mysteries of her own. Not just mysteries of ailments and treatments, but ultimate mysteries of mortality, love, and the timeless human spirit. The novel contains medical lore and sensuous, vivid details of Renaissance life.

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A female doctor's journey in the Renaissance submitted by vickik on June 23, 2023, 11:09am The Book of Madness and Cures tells the story of Gabriella, a female doctor in 16th century Venice. She has gained success under the mentorship of her father, a famous physician, but he has been away for ten years, on a journey to collect material for a comprehensive Book of Diseases. His latest letter informs Gabriella that he does not intend to return. Without her father to sponsor her, the guild of physicians expels Gabriella, and she leaves Venice on a journey to find him. Accompanied by two loyal servants, she follows the mysterious clues in her father’s infrequent letters. Her journey takes her through Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, France, Spain, and eventually to Morocco. On the way, Gabriella meets with people who have seen her father, and she comes to realize that he may be slowly losing his mind. She decides to continue her father’s work on the Book of Diseases, and the narrative is interspersed with Gabriella’s descriptions of various diseases and cures that she discovers along her journey.

This is poet Regina O’Melveny’s first novel, and she describes Gabriella’s travels in beautiful, lyrical prose. Renaissance Europe and northern Africa come to life in vivid detail, and the novel provides a fascinating insight into what it was like to be one of the few women physicians of the time. Women who practiced medicine were often accused of witchcraft, and Gabriella runs into this danger at several stages of her journey, and she also is forced to travel in male disguise at times. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in historical fiction or the history of medicine.