LA MEDICINA NEL CAFFÈ
https://doi.org/10.4081/incontri.2021.730
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The magazine of Milan Enlightenment had an open attitude to the new knowledge spreading through Europe and was committed towards the dissemination of the so-called «useful studies». This implied that themes related to medicine were widely present among its articles, which recognized the central role of medicine in social life and presented it as both the inescapable premise of the ‘well-being’ of individuals and the population at large, and the aim of any good administration. Il Caffè decisively stands for ‘new’ medicine, the one that best takes into account the progress of studies, and that values the constant updating of its practitioners; medicine to be considered as science rather than experience. Thanks to all these elements, together with its inclusion in the complex system of scientific knowledge (inherently subject to constant verification), the lively formula of erudite entertainment opens, in more than one case, to concrete results, as in Pietro Verri’s article Sull’innesto del vaiuolo (On smallpox grafting); here, the author resolutely places the Caffè in favor of the still suspect practice of inoculation. Furthermore, even though it is Pietro Verri again who offers a wide-ranging nomenclature framework (with the article La medicina), undoubtedly most of the contributors are involved in dealing with these issues with an almost revolutionary narrative writing; certainly the model is English educational journalism, but with an incisiveness that also pays attention to the emerging sensiblerie, especially the «diseases of imagination» and those from which «more or less every man suffers without exactly distinguishing the cause».