TITLE:
DANTE’s Medical Knowledge: The Case of INFERNO, Canto XXX
AUTHORS:
Luigi Roffi
KEYWORDS:
Dante Alighieri, Hepatic Cirrhosis, Ascites, History of Medicine
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Historical Studies,
Vol.7 No.1,
March
28,
2018
ABSTRACT: The
Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, describes an imaginative
journey in afterlife. In Hell, canto XXX, Dante meets the falsifiers and sees a
man who has the shape of a lute, a rotting face, and an abdomen bloated by “dropsy”.
This horribly deformed sinner is Master Adam, who counterfeited Florentine
money, and for this crime was burned at the stake. Previous critics had
ascribed Master Adam’s punishment to various real or imaginary diseases, but an
alternative possibility is that it may represent one of the most ancient, yet
accurate, descriptions of tense ascites in the literature.