The Sick Body of the Artisan

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• Department of History

Bernardino Ramazzini’s De Morbis Artificum Diatriba (On the Diseases of Workers), was a highly successful text, commonly regarded as the first treatise on occupational medicine. This paper situates it in the context of early modern writings on the mechanical arts, asking what it meant for a physician like Ramazzini to focus on the diseases of workers at that time. It shows that the work’s novelty did not so much rest in its contents as in its argument. While Diseases of Workers contained little new information on how to treat workers, its argument that physicians should pay attention to patients’ occupations was a novel and polemical one. The paper discusses the implications of this argument for the relationship between physicians and the state.

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