Leonardo Fioravanti (doctor)

Leonardo Fioravanti (1517 to 1588) was a noted doctor, surgeon and alchemist active in Italy in the sixteenth century. He was born in Bologna on 5 October 1517 to Gabriele and Margarite Fioravanti and was baptised at the Metropolitan Cathedral of Saint Peter. He received a first degree in medicine at Naples and a second at Bologna on 27 March 1568, and the king of Spain raised him into the nobility. He lived for a time in Rome and in Venice and in other important Italian cities, and in Palermo he performed the first recorded splenectomy on Italian soil. Historians have long portrayed him as the epitome of the cunning and dishonest charlatan, though he was by no means the first or the only itinerant medical practitioner of his kind. His printed works, issued mostly at Venice, include Capricci medicinali and Secreti medicinali (1561), Del regimento della peste (1565), La cirurgia (1570), which John Hester translated into English in 1580 as A Short Discours upon Chirurgerie, and Il tesoro della vita humana (1582). He died in Bologna in 1588.