Un'analisi semantica del termine erysipelas. Le Centuriae di Amato Lusitano nella tradizione dei testi dall'Antichità al Rinascimento'

Finding one’s way in the medical lexicon of the past is always hard, but there are some terms which more than others present interpretive difficulties due to their intrinsic polysemous nature. The case of erysipelas, and expressions linked thereto such as herpes esthiomenus, is paradigmatic inasmuch as it demonstrates how nosographic terms bear different meanings, not only following their passage from one linguistic register to another and their appearance in various medical texts, but also in relation to the way of understanding the disease, and therefore of describing it, in cultural contexts other than medicine. The purpose of the article is to highlight this semantic complexity, setting out from the description of several clinical cases –and related scholia– dealing with the disease in question and found in Amatus Lusitanus’s Centuriae. In particular, Amatus’s lexicon will be studied in relationship to that of Galen emerging from the most modern 16th century Latin translations, that of mediaeval medical texts, and the lexicon deriving from a ‘folk’ context.