Article ID: CBB001320014

Medicine as Enlightenment Cure: Benedetto Frizzi, Physician to Eighteenth-Century Italian Jewish Society (2012)

unapi

This article examines modern Jewish doctors and the Enlightenment in action through its analysis of Dr. Benedetto Frizzi (1756-1844) as an Enlightenment Jewish physician and public intellectual in Habsburg northern Italy. Frizzi sought to spread the new Enlightenment gospel of polizia medica---public health policy or social medicine---that he learned from its pioneering exponent, Dr. Johann Peter Frank, his teacher at the University of Pavia. Frizzi dispensed Enlightenment medicine for the benefit of the state and society in general, as well as Jewish society and culture in particular, for he saw himself as both public health crusader and doctor-priest ministering to his own people. His commitments to Enlightenment science and rationalism led him to criticize Jewish social practices harshly even as he creatively reinterpreted classic Jewish texts; accordingly, Frizzi was regarded in some quarters as subversive, while in others as an apologetic defender of Jews and Judaism. Situating Frizzi within the traditions of Jewish as well as European Enlightenment physicians, this article raises broader questions about religion and secularism in the modern discourse of medicalized Judaism.

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Authors & Contributors
Iorio, Elena
Munno, Cristina
Betta, Emmanuel
Roberto Sani
Maria Antonella Piga
Baldasseroni, Alberto
Concepts
Medicine
Medicine and society
Physicians; doctors
Medicine and religion
Vaccines; vaccination
Public health
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
Medieval
21st century
Early modern
Places
Italy
Bologna (Italy)
Piedmont
Jerusalem
England
Naples (Italy)
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