New 3QD-column:
I don’t know how much you know about Petrarch. My guess is that you know him as a poet, primarily for his sonnets. Maybe you associate him with early Italian humanism and its reinvigorated dedication to the wisdom of classical Antiquity. Or perhaps you think of him as someone who expressed transcendental truths about the soul and its searching and wandering nature.
All of this may be true. As of recently, however, I can’t help but think of him as that guy who spent dozens of pages (more than 80, in a modern printed edition) yelling at a physician.
Or yelling at all physicians, possibly. Petrarch is slightly abstruse about the extent to which he seeks to put down physicians in general, or some subclass of physicians, or this singularly annoying physician in particular.
More here