Families, medical secrets and public health in early modern Venice

This article highlights women's contribution to public health in early modern Venice using the case study of Marieta Colochi and her family's medical secret. This medical cure operated as a dowry, an important object within female inheritance and was also sold to the Venetian Republic for a significant sum of money because of its apparent success in treating the plague. The city's Health Office employed family members to administer the treatment, including Marieta. Surviving texts describe her as a salaried doctor and the Health Office archive records the use of her medical services in Venice and across the territorial state. Marieta's attempt at election as an independent Health Office doctor failed but she continued to be employed alongside male members of her family. Her history suggests that the nature of record‐keeping for early modern public health, with its emphasis on office‐holding, may have obscured the contributions made by women. The family unit emerges as significant in a private and public sense: the Health Office authorities dealt with individual, skilled medical women by employing them within family relationships and provided opportunities for female employment in healthcare within institutions that were modelled on the family in a symbolic way. Viewing women's work through the lens of the family allows historians to acknowledge the gender hierarchies of early modern society whilst illuminating the valuable contributions which could be made by women to the healthcare of this period.

medicine, the family has been shown to have had public and private functions and the regulation of family life, like that of medical care, has been seen to have come under the control of an increasingly pervasive, patriarchal early modern state. 9 One offshoot of this has been to assume that 'official' medicine was largely masculine. 10 Through a focus upon the family in the context of public health, this article will contribute to the historiography by undermining the distinction often drawn between feminine 'domestic' and masculine 'official' medicine. 11 In the context of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Italian artisans, and with a different historiographical purpose, Sandra Cavallo has noted that 'the tendency to make the "family" synonymous with the household has greatly inhibited our understanding of its function'; in the context of early modern women's work in healthcare, this article will argue that the same is true. 12 Marieta Colochi may represent an 'exception [rather than a] rule' but her history and that of her family suggest that the nature of record-keeping in the context of public health may have obscured the contributions made by other women like her within their medical families. 13 The significance of the family unit for shaping the work of the Colochi family in general, and Marieta in particular, will be explored in the first section. The second will highlight those early modern charitable and medical institutions within which administrative structures were shaped by marriage and parenthood in a symbolic as well as a practical way; these sites provided significant, if under-studied, opportunities to women, including Marieta Colochi, to offer medical services within a constructed family unit. The third section will consider characterizations of women's work in healthcare, emphasizing that labels such as 'official' and 'pseudo' medicine are unhelpful if we wish to understand women's contributions to early modern Venetian public health.
The work of the Colochi family in both 'domestic' and 'official' medical contexts was interwoven with the story of a remarkable medical secret. The term 'secret' was used to refer to craft or trade remedies as well as recipes which promised to effect wondrous change, although many became infamous for being ineffective. 14 Medical secrets were important and established features of early modern medical cultures, both domestic and commercial, and were sold widely in marketplaces, streets and through cheap print cultures. 15 Such a secret was owned by the Colochi family. It was not a unique type of remedy but it was unusual because it was sold to the Venetian Republic in 1576 for a large sum of money and used to treat the plague as part of official public health structures within the city of Venice as well as its territorial state; as a result, documentation of the medical cure is unusually detailed. Surviving archival and printed material reveals that the Colochi medical secret was administered by the men and women of the family, provided financial support for a cross-section of family members, and worked as a mechanism of familybuilding, operating as a dowry in its own right. The function of the secret in marriage relations places it in a similar context as other valuable, artisanal recipe books, which Francesca Trivellato has shown were included in women's dowries in early modern Venice. 16 Recipe books have received extensive attention from historians, who have used them to illustrate 'the understanding and use of learned, lay and practical bodily and natural knowledge in the home'. 17 As Sharon Strocchia has illustrated, the transmission of specialist knowledge or skills has traditionally been studied in 'a university or guild setting' but a focus upon alternative spaces (in her case, the convent) can illustrate the 'overlap between household medicine and commercial remedies'. 18 The Colochi medical secret draws attention to the transmission of skills and knowledge within the family. What emerges, challenges assumptions drawn on the basis of early modern gender hierarchies; Marieta Colochi, for example, is frequently described as a teacher to male medical practitioners. Although her de jure position within the family may have been subordinate, her de facto role in medicine emerges as significant. 19 THE COLOCHI FAMILY AND PUBLIC HEALTH In 1576, during a severe outbreak of plague, Ascanio Olivieri, who had been appointed as the doctor responsible for the Venetian lazaretti [plague hospitals] by the Health Office in 1567, offered to sell a secret cure to the Republic. In his supplication, Olivieri recognized the scale of infection within the city at the time and claimed that the problem in curing the population was the delay in getting the sick to the city's plague hospitals, meaning that they continued to infect others and remained without treatment themselves. Olivieri claimed that his secret immediately stopped pain and extinguished the strength of the disease; to meet the wider needs of the city, he suggested that his cure should be purchased and distributed by the Health Office to individual households as a supplement to the care provided within civic hospitals. His secret incorporated internal and external treatments (for giandusse [boils] and carboni [small pustules]) but did not involve surgery of any kind and was obviously considered by Olivieri to be of high value. He requested 5,000 ducats as a one-off payment and thirty ducats per month for the rest of his life and the lives of his children (male or female); those male or female children would be obliged to serve the Health Office, according to need. 20 This lump sum of 5,000 ducats was the equivalent of almost thirty-five years' worth of salary payments. Financial negotiations ensued with Health Office officials keen to purchase this remedy. They responded with an offer of 3,000 ducats and the monthly payment of thirty ducats. A few months later Olivieri received the much lower sum of 800 ducats as a one-off payment (still five times his current salary) and the promised salary increase to thirty ducats, which was exempted from taxes including the Venetian decima. 21 The supplication which Olivieri sent to the Health Office in 1576 to offer his secret for sale had two points of emphasis. The first was that the cure had been used with success during previous epidemics in Venice and its territorial state. Second, it deployed Olivieri's own family structure. It is this latter element of 19 The distinction between theory and practice in the context of marriage and the family is emphasized in Maria Ågren and Amy Erickson (eds.), The Marital Economy in Scandinavia andBritain, 1400-1900 24 Olivieri requested such a high, one-off payment from the Republic partly because the secret had operated as this source of financial support. Given the high costs of dowries during the sixteenth century, the importance of these arrangements within marriage relations and the function of dowries as 'important reserves of wealth', it is indicative of the cure's perceived value that it was used in this way before the question of the sale with the Health Office had even been broached. 25 The significance of Olivieri's marital family unit can also be seen in his original employment contract in 1567 with the Health Office, which emphasized that he was the son-in-law of Donna Marieta, widow of the Health Office doctor Nicolo Colochi. The contract stressed that Marieta was in possession of her husband's medical secret. Olivieri was informed that a condition of his employment with the Health Office was that he must support and provide for (sustentar et allimentar) his mother-in-law. Marieta, in turn, was instructed to teach Olivieri how to minister the secret (insignar fidelmente ditto secretto al ditto suo zenero). Furthermore, she was obliged to accompany Olivieri into the lazaretti when requested by the Health Office to use the secret and treat the sick by hand (adoperar ditto suo secretto et medicar manualmente li infermi). 26 There are two important points to note here. First, Marieta's work as a medical practitioner was considered sufficiently significant by the Health Office to warrant this attempt to secure its availability in times of need in a wide-ranging manner. She is mentioned treating the sick by hand and it is not suggested that she treated female patients exclusively. Given her role as a teacher to her son-in-law, it does not seem as though her work was gendered. Second, it is clear that possession of the text of a medical secret was not considered in itself to be a guarantee that it could be used effectively. Though Marieta's daughter and Olivieri had inherited the text, Marieta's expert experience was still required. Despite the apparent gender hierarchies of the early modern medical world, Marieta's experience clearly gave her knowledge and skills that her son-in-law lacked, even with his training as a surgeon and his possession of the text of the secret. Some of the surviving texts of the Colochi secret reveal the nature of Marieta's important teaching role. She is not mentioned in the best-known version: the official text of Olivieri's secret issued and circulated in Venice three days after the sale, which contained heavily curtailed advice in the interest of providing simple guidance so that the secret could be easily administered within the city's households. 27 The most extensive extant description of the cure is dated 1598 and is likely to be the broad form in which the cure was sold by Olivieri to the Health Office. 28 In this version, Marieta is described as a salaried female doctor ('medica salariata'), an unusual label in an early modern context. 29 This text makes clear that the Colochi treatment involved a number of stages: diagnosis, the preparation and administration of medical treatment (including possible surgical treatment of swellings), the regulation of diet and, in certain circumstances, bloodletting. It also includes a preventative medicine for those suspected of having come into contact with the infection and methods for identifying plague as cause of death. In other words, the cure that Marieta was teaching her son-in-law bridged pharmacy and physic, as well as basic skills in post-mortem assessments. Like other early modern women, she may have been expert in the preparation of the medical 26 ASV, Sanità 731, 34r. 27 Biblioteca del Museo Correr, Venice (hereafter BMC), Donà della rosa, 10-32. 28 BMC, Donà della rosa, 181/I 1- 16. 29 Pomata notes that this was a term used in medieval Bologna but that it disappears from later records and cites evidence of a similar trend from fourteenth-century Venice. See Pomata, 'Practicing between Earth and Heaven', 121 and note 5. treatment but archival documents record that she also administered the cure. 30 It is extremely unlikely that Marieta herself would have been involved in bloodletting, since barber surgeons were employed for this purpose in the institutions within which she worked but it is certainly clear that her expertise moved beyond the external treatment of the body usually associated with women's medical work. 31 With the holistic nature of the secret cure in mind, it is useful to note that other copies of the Colochi secret survive in the Vatican library and these attribute ownership of the cure to Marieta, as well as Nicolo Colochi and Ascanio Olivieri. The texts that advertise the cure as belonging to Olivieri include the official printed version discussed above and a cheap print leaflet which highlights his role as doctor at the plague hospital. 32 The copies attributed to Nicolo and Marieta Colochi are also examples of cheap print leaflets of varying quality. 33 In Nicolo's version, the cure's holistic elements are described over the course of two days and treatments for those aged over and under twenty are differentiated. The version attributed to Nicolo, therefore, is fairly faithful to the original and blurs the boundary between two print genres: the regimen-style advice associated with physicians (which provided more individual treatment on the basis of age, gender and lifestyle) and the more generalized treatment of secrets. 34 As with Olivieri, Nicolo is described as Health Office doctor in Venice in the title of the text.
In the leaflet attributed to Marieta, which is the most basic of all, other cures for swellings are included, including one said to have been used in Turkey. There are some parallels with the version attributed to Nicolo. In particular, one recipe for treating swellings is similar, as is the internal medicine. In Marieta's version, though, the instructions for the internal medicine are less detailed; in fact, only the ingredients are listed. Most notable regarding this printed version is the omission of the secret's second day's treatment. As a result, there is no mention of the cure's distinctive ingredient (the herb smartella [myrtle]). This herb is described in every other surviving version but 30 Ibid., 120, for example, illustrates that in seventeenth-century Bologna, Isabella Fontana 'claimed sole responsibility for the preparation [of a medical secret] declaring that her husband was simply in charge of selling it'. 31 Bloodletting was also a controversial treatment for the plague. See Stevens Crawshaw, Plague hospitals, 160. in Marieta's it is only the other, more standard herbal waters of bocolosa and endive which are mentioned. It may have been that the producer of this cheap print leaflet wished to avoid discussions of the various species and sizes of smartella in the interests of brevity and limiting costs. Complicated recipes could be perceived as potentially dangerous rather than ingenious and exciting. Marieta's version provides a number of external medicines for swellings rather than internal treatments; the former may have been thought to be more appropriate for the cheap print market. The attribution of ownership of the cure in one of the versions of the secret is nevertheless a fascinating reflection of Marieta's important role in administering the cure and the degree of contemporary recognition which accompanied her success.
Marieta was not only known for her abilities in relation to the treatment of the sick. She also appears to have had further, valuable skills in the disinfection of goods. A supplication to the Health Office after Marieta's death in 1568 described her success in healing the sick as well as her skill and ability (sua arte e ingegno) in teaching others to clean goods (insegnato a netar e salvar li mobeli), thereby preventing them having to be burned. It is notable that, again, Marieta is described as taking an instructive role, demonstrating a valuable craft to others, this time one which prevented personal property from being burned in order to prevent the spread of plague. The cleaning of trade goods and personal property was a significant area in which the Venetian Health Office invested by purchasing secrets and securing the services of skilled individuals. The potential cost to individuals as well as to the state if large numbers of goods were lost was, after all, great: goods which were burned led to compensation having to be paid to owners by the Republic. 35 Although Marieta's methods for disinfecting goods are not mentioned as having been purchased as a secret, letters survive from 1598 in the aftermath of Olivieri's work in Cividale del Friuli, in which he describes methods for cleaning and disinfecting goods in detail. 36 Olivieri does not cite Marieta Colochi directly but it is likely that he utilized her methods in relation to the cleaning of goods as he did for the treatment of patients.
It is clear from archival and printed sources that Marieta was accepted and valued as a medical practitioner with wide-ranging skills: indeed, the preamble to her cheap print version of the cure describes her as 'M. Marieta Colochi, fu di M. Nicolo Colochi Grecho, Medico al lazaretto vecchio, l'anno 1556', portraying her both as a doctor and the widow of a Health Office doctor. We have seen that she worked for the Venetian Health Office in conjunction, initially, with her husband and, later, with her son-in-law. 37 Marieta did not, however, succeed in being supported or elected as an independent medical practitioner. The Health Office records show that when Marieta applied for the role of doctor to the lazaretti in 1558, six years after the death of her husband, she 35 For more information see Stevens Crawshaw, Plague Hospitals, 209-22. 36  was refused and had garnered no support at all from the Venetian Procurators. It is by no means clear as to why Marieta proposed herself for election, presumably with some degree of expectation that she could be successful. Her attempt to achieve official recognition for her work distinguishes her from other women who may have carried out similar work within their family units but leave no trace in archival documentation. Marieta seems to have applied for the job of Health Office doctor following her service as a buona donna ('good woman') on the lazaretto nuovo [new plague hospital] during the plague epidemic of 1555-8. This role had, in the fifteenth century, been known as the 'prioress' and carried with it particular responsibilities for caring for female patients and children. A process of masculinization is evident in the changing roles of the prior and prioress during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the prior came to be the pre-eminent figure; it was largely the bureaucratic elements of the prioress's work, rather than the medical responsibilities, which were lost. Reference to Marieta's medical work within this role survives from April 1555, when the Health Office officials had written to the lazaretto doctor Ludovico Cucino expressing concern about a recipe from Donna Marieta, which they had been sent in relation to her care of children. Marieta was specifically instructed not to medicate or use any remedies without Cucino's permission. 38 It is clear that the concern of the Health Office officials was not that Marieta was treating the sick but that she was doing so without recourse to Cucino. His letterbook illustrates that he was paid substantially more money and was expected to take on significantly more responsibility within the lazaretti than his predecessors and he appears to have been particularly concerned about issues of hierarchy; a similar exercise had been undertaken just a few days earlier when the Health Office officials wrote to two surgeons on the lazaretto vecchio that Cucino was to be obeyed as a 'doctor superior to them'. 39 The prior at the lazaretto nuovo remained in office at the end of the plague epidemic in 1558 and it does not appear that Marieta would have lost her employment as the buona donna at this juncture. Instead, her self-perception as an experienced, competent healer and her work within the lazaretto seems to have motivated her application for promotion and official recognition. She might also have been enticed by the higher monthly salary received by the Health Office doctor. Presumably, in the aftermath of the plague of 1555-8, she felt that the significance of her public health contribution had been illustrated to the Health Office. By contrast, the Health Office officials may have considered it particularly inappropriate to elect a woman, given the recent severe outbreak of plague, and in view of the contrast between her level 38 Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London, ms 223 (hereafter Cucino), 18v (18 April 1555). 39 This instruction was sent shortly after Cucino was asked to adopt temporarily the position of prior as well as that of doctor. The full instruction, therefore, reads that he is to be ubidirlo et come Priore et come Medico superiore a Voi; Cucino,13v (15 April 1555). of formal education and that of Cucino. The nature of the surviving Venetian Health Office archive means that we have only the summary of the election results and lack any detail of discussions that may have taken place or evidence which may have been mobilized in support of her application but it is interesting to note that the other candidates for the role were described in terms of their place of origin and occupation. Marieta was described as the widow of Nicolo Colochi; the Health Office notary lacked even an occupational label for her service to the state.
That Marieta felt qualified to apply for a role staffed exclusively by men sheds some light on the nature of her work; it was her access to the bureaucratic structures of the Health Office, rather than her expertise, which was limited by her gender. 40 It was formal office-holding which remained out of her reach. Mary Fissell has noted that 'family business . . . was structured in such a way that we often cannot know which person was doing exactly what work.' 41 The temptation for the early modern historian is to try to narrow down Marieta's responsibilities; certainly the work of medical spouses and within medical families would be an interesting topic for further research. 42 Surviving sources illustrate that Marieta took on many of the same responsibilities as her husband and son-in-law and developed considerable medical expertise. 43 The Venetian Health Office recognized the value of her experience but struggled to know how to secure her services, except within her family unit.
In 1559, seven years after Nicolo's death and the year after Marieta's election attempt, the Health Office notary noted that many people had been cured by the Colochi treatment and the Health Office needed to provide for 'any eventuality which might occur'. It was said to be necessary to retain the Colochi family's services (intertenir questa famiglia [my emphasis]) by providing three ducats a month for Marieta and her son Giacomo. This money bound them to serve the Health Office whenever there was need and to reside, during periods of plague, in the city's lazaretti. 44 The language of the family in Marieta's appointment in 1559 is significant. We have already seen that her skills were later retained in a similar way alongside her son-in-law Olivieri, from 1567.
The attempt to secure Marieta's work alongside that of her son seems to have been largely symbolic. Giacomo is rarely mentioned in surviving documentation. In the supplication from Marieta's daughter Daria to the Health 40 A similar point could be made for Ginevra Rossi who was trained in the confectioner's arts and worked as deputy manager in the house and shop of her husband Guglielmo Rossi in early modern Rome. She is the subject of Cohen, 'Miscarriages of Apothecary Justice'. 41  Office in 1568, a few days after her mother's death, she mentions that Giacomo had been absent from the city for many years and was presumed to be dead. 45 During the fifteen-year period between Nicolo's death in 1552 and Olivieri's appointment in 1567, Marieta's participation in Venetian public health stretched even beyond the city into the territorial state. According to the same supplication by Daria, Marieta had personally ministered the Colochi secret in Capo d'Istria, in Venice itself, in Agort, in Belluno, in Desenzano and other villages besides by 1567. 46 Before 1552, she would have travelled with her husband Nicolo and, in 1567 Marieta and Olivieri served together. In Giacomo's absence in the intervening fifteen years, the remaining journeys may have been taken independently. Travel of this kind is not commonly associated with artisan women. It is reminiscent of the movements of wealthier land owners, who crossed the terraferma to visit their possessions. 47 Such travel was common for a Venetian Health Office doctor but it has not been realized that these journeys could have been undertaken by families and that female medical practitioners could be sufficiently valued for the experience of administering medical secrets to have been sent throughout the territorial state in an official capacity, directed by the Venetian Health Office. Marieta's skills in administering medical secrets to treat the plague and disinfect goods enabled her to work in civic hospitals within Venice and its territorial state. Throughout her career, her involvement with public health structures was interlinked with her family. Even after Marieta's death in 1568, the Colochi medical secret continued to have an impact upon the women of that family because of its important role within female inheritance. Marieta's two daughters, Paola and Daria, both benefited from the family cure. The secret provided financial security for all of Nicolo Colochi's immediate family and, ultimately, the financial provision for three dowries. Besides operating as the dowry for Olivieri's wife Paola, the sale of the secret enabled Olivieri to leave a cash dowry of 500 ducats for his own daughter Lucretia as well as a sum of ten ducats a month from his income given by the Senate in his will of 1578. 48 The secret was the basis for the request made by Nicolo and Marieta's second daughter, Daria, for an occupation (the nature of which was not specified) worth five ducats per month; until a position became available, Daria was granted three ducats per month. 49 The monthly money, she said, would help her to provide a dowry, so that she might marry or enter a convent. Daria had written of having been reduced to the miserable state of being a poor, 45 ASV, Sanità, 731 83r (1568). 46 ASV, Sanità, 731 83r (undated). 47 Chojnacka, Working Women, 115. 48 ASV, Notarile, Testamenti, Atti Cavanis b.193 no. 6 (29 April 1578). 49 ASV, Sanità, 731 83r (1568). orphaned spinster, her only possession being the medical secret left to her by her mother. 50 Daria's inheritance of her family's medical secret opens up a further, interesting perspective on the perceived value of the cure. A supplication from July 1576 survives from Scipeone Paragatto from Agort [Agordo], established by Sabrina Minuzzi to have been a notary, who appears to have married Daria and received the same Colochi medical cure as a result of Daria's inheritance. 51 He offered his remedy and preventative water against the plague for sale to the Venetian Health Office, which he emphasized had been used by his parents-in-law, Nicolo and Marieta Colochi. His offer to the Health Office was made one month before Olivieri's supplication offering his secret for sale. The archive documents are silent regarding the reaction of both the Health Office and Olivieri to Paragatto's offer. Olivieri seems to have benefited from his existing contract, as well as his experience of working alongside Marieta Colochi, giving him preferential treatment in the sale of the Colochi secret over the notary from Agort. The supplication from Paragatto may have been the spur for the sale of the secret by Olivieri -to enable him to continue in his successful career with the Health Office. Equally, this is likely to have been the incentive for the Health Office to welcome Olivieri's offer and to make a quick sale. Instead of being allowed to sell the secret, Paragatto was given the position of head body clearer by the Venetian Health Office. He was wellremunerated, although it was a job which involved exposure to the plague. His responsibilities were largely bureaucratic and included keeping count of the body clearers in service and distributing them to places of need so that they could clear bodies to sites of burial. 52 Furthermore, he was instructed to give the body clearers whatever preservative necessary to maintain the health of these workers, using the same cure that he had offered to sell and he was allocated supplies of the herb smartella. 53 Both parties, therefore, gained some profit from their exchanges with the Health Office in relation to their wives' family cure and were employed in medical roles with responsibility for administering that same treatment.
Thus far, the Colochi medical secret has been considered in the context of family building, particularly through its role as a dowry. In relation to the sale of secrets to the state, however, it is clear that family claims could be competing, since both Olivieri and Paragatto sought to sell the secret and capitalize financially upon its perceived success. The Health Office dealt with the potential tensions deftly in granting Paragatto an occupation in lieu of the sale but there also appear to have been negotiations within the family. Papers in the 50 'reduta in suma miseria in eta nubile dottata solamente del detto secretto lasatomi da essa q mia madre priva di padre et madre', in ASV, Sanità, 731 83r (1568). Marieta's will has not been located. 51 55 It may well be that these investments were designed to compensate Paragatto for the loss of the sale of the secret to the Health Office, since both men could have legally claimed ownership of the secret recipe. More generally, medical secrets could provide financial support to both male and female heirs. 56 In the context of the Ospedale di San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti, Venice's beggars' hospital, Giuseppe Ellero has recorded the employment of specialized empirics (specialisti empirici), such as Donna Gasparina who possessed an unguent for leprosy which was purchased in 1602 from her daughter, who had obviously inherited it. 57 In 1564, Simon da Udine offered a recipe to Venice's Health Office which had been given to him as the heir of Angelo de Fortis, who had served Venice during the plague outbreak of 1556. Both recipes and skills could be inherited; this was recognized, when the Colochi secret was sold, in the stipulation that Olivieri's heirs, whether male or female, should continue to serve the Health Office if there was need. 58 Inheritance and the role of the family, therefore, were often emphasized in order to help to establish the authenticity of a remedy. 59 In the case of the Colochi secret, it is clear that this was a significant text in the context of female inheritance and the creation of family wealth. In early modern Venice, women could own property and do so, if they were married, independent of their husbands. 60 Marieta's prominent role in the history of this secret cure may have developed because it had been her recipe, perhaps brought into her marriage to Nicolo as part of her own dowry. In Venice, the dowry fell within the administrative control of husbands during their lifetimes but was returned to wives on the death of the spouse. 61 This might explain the inheritance of the secret by the women of the Colochi family (initially Marieta after Nicolo's death and then Paola and Daria) rather than the son Giacomo. Marieta also played an essential role in the teaching of skills associated with the treatment; she had developed a level of expertise which might suggest a long-standing association with the cure. These skills were considered to be vital to the success of the text.
Medical expertise and work in the public health sphere could provide women with a degree of independence, as well as support and opportunities reminiscent of those provided by early modern guild structures. Health Office doctors generally did not belong to the College of Physicians; membership in this body was not compulsory for those practising medicine within the city. 62 Many of the men appointed to the post of Health Office doctor to the lazaretti were foreigners, with most being drawn from elsewhere on the Italian peninsula and France. The protagonists of the Colochi case were no exception: Nicolo Colochi was a Greek doctor, Ascanio Olivieri was Sicilian and Paragatto was from Agort (within the Venetian mainland state). These individuals did not have 'a guild structure through which men would hold a full range of privileges with their wives, widows and daughters holding limited rights in the craft'. 63 Though women in early modern Venice did have access to membership of guilds dealing with textiles and clothing they lacked such structures in the sphere of medicine and may, paradoxically, have been less constrained in their access to work as a result. Through the sale of the Colochi secret the women of these foreigners' families were given support, opportunities and obligations. This was recognized by Nicolo and Marieta's daughter Daria, in her aforementioned request to the Health Office after her parents' deaths, which emphasized her poverty and her state as an orphan. She requested that the monthly sum previously provided to her mother and brother continued to be paid to her so that she was not forced, out of necessity, to 'do the things that women of ill repute do' (non sia sfociata per necessita far quello fano le done di mal affari). 64 It may be that her parents' status as immigrants into Venice would have heightened contemporary concern regarding her potential fall into prostitution. 65 Certainly, the supplication makes clear that Daria was aware of the support accessible to her from the state.
The history of the Colochi medical secret brings into sharp relief the broad significance of the medical family as an institution of medical provision, a body which imparted authenticity and a unit for the transmission of objects and skills. The family could shape women's work within a city or broader territorial state as well as the home and the parish. The significance of the family can also be seen in charitable and medical institutions, where the 62 On the Venetian College see Palmer, The Studio of Venice. 63 Trivellato, 'Guilds, Technology and Economic Change', 214. Women in early modern Venice did have access to membership of guilds dealing with textiles and clothing. See Richard S. Mackenney, 'Continuity and change in the scuole piccole of Venice c.1250-c.1600', Renaissance Studies 8 (1994), 388-403. 64 ASV, Sanità, 731 83r (1568). 65 Chojnacka, Working Women, 82 identifies that a high proportion of prostitutes in early modern Venice were immigrants. language and structure of the natural, nuclear family was often appropriated and where women, again, could be given important opportunities for medical work.

CIVIC INSTITUTIONS AND THE IDEA OF THE FAMILY
Thus far, we have seen that the family unit could play a part in enabling women's involvement with public health. The family's structure was also adopted for the administration of centralized charitable institutions; although this has been widely acknowledged, it has been studied only superficially. 66 Broadening our understanding of the significance of the idea and unit of the family within public health further emphasizes that the opportunities for women within early modern healthcare were not limited to the home and parish. This can be seen in the context of the administration of the Venetian plague hospitals, or lazaretti, the institutions within the Colochi family principally worked.
The Venetian lazaretti were run by a prior and appointed with a prioress to serve alongside him. In early statutes, such as in 1432, the relationship between the prior and prioress was not stipulated; the only detailed information on the prioress related to payment. 67 By 1479, it was stated that the prioress should be the prior's wife. 68 By 1484, the statutes allowed for the appointment of unmarried priors: if that was the case, a 'good woman' (buona donna) should be appointed with him. Her salary was permanent. 69 This was the position that Marieta Colochi seems to have held less than a century later and an exploration of the practical and symbolic impact of the family structure on this role illuminates further perspectives on her specific experiences as well as opportunities for women's work in healthcare more generally.
Initially it is clear that the prior and prioress worked together within the Venetian lazaretti. One early prioress, Anzola Mauritio, took responsibility for the lazaretto vecchio whilst her husband, Hieronimo, served in the Venetian fleet under Andrea Loredan. She was appointed in conjunction with her son, Valerio. After Hieronimo's death, Valerio was appointed prior with Anzola obliged to serve alongside him. 70 Anzola did not receive a separate salary but Valerio was specifically instructed to support his family -including his mother, four sisters and three brothers. This arrangement simultaneously acknowl-edged common gender hierarchies while allowing the hospital to capitalize on medical expertise of female family members. Indeed, it was stressed that the support for his family was a central purpose underlying his appointment as prior. An early sixteenth-century example replicated this arrangement when Prior Cristoforo de' Bartolis left the lazaretto nuovo in the care of his wife and son. 71 Not only was the idea of the family significant in the administration of the lazaretti but it was also a significant unit for determining the appointment of priors through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Mauritio family provided priors for the lazaretto vecchio for fifty years. A single family (the Nassins) supplied the prior to the Venetian lazaretto nuovo for over a century. In return for loyal service during the Venetian occupancy of Napoli di Romania and to compensate for the abandoned wealth, the family were granted the position of prior of the lazaretto nuovo for the lifetime of Nicolo Nassin (who was appointed in 1545) and his son Zorzi (who served between 1555 and 1576). Their descendants continued to hold the position through the seventeenth century. 72 In seeking to recommend their successors, individual priors often emphasized the importance of a family unit which had served together and within which sons had gained experience of administration. 73 It is clear that the female members of these family units could be recognized as important and skilled in the medical field. In 1576, for example, Cecilia Maraveglia, the wife of the Prior Zorzi Nassin, was granted a licence to leave the lazaretto nuovo in order to treat the sick in the city, although she was soon recalled to the plague hospital because of the great need there. 74 Although briefly mentioned, the medical work of the prioress emphasizes that female members of a family belonging to the cittadino ['citizen'] strata of Venetian society could also operate as valued medical practitioners and were employed within their family units, with their work being directed by the Venetian Health Office.
The fifteenth-century Venetian lazaretti were not unusual within the context of charitable institutions in early modern Europe in being administered by a married couple. Merry Wiesner's study of working women illustrated that the pesthouse, orphanages and bathhouses of early modern Germany utilized this structure. 75 The family model was particularly appropriate for institutions which cared for children in providing holistic care for the body (through 71 ASV, Sanità 726 10r (7 August 1517). 72 Nicolo died during the outbreak of plague of 1555 and Zorzi during that of 1576. During the later outbreak, Zorzi had transferred from the lazaretto nuovo to the lazaretto vecchio to undertake the role of prior, leaving the lazaretto nuovo in the hands of his son Nicolo. After Zorzi's death, the role of prior passed to his brother Zuanne. Zuanne continued in the role until into the 1590s and after his death, the position passed to his son Nicolo. Details of the family are available in their various supplications, for example ASV, Sanità 729 66v (24 January 1544), 730 188r (19 January 1557) and 736 169v (1594). 73  nutrition and medicine) and soul (through religious education). In Venice, the city's medical and charitable structures often employed a prioress with the purpose of serving 'as a mother' to the children within the institutions' care. 76 The 'fathers' and 'mothers' of these sites could be unrelated. 77 Nicholas Terpstra's studies have illustrated that orphanages in early modern Italy were administered using a symbolic family structure. In the course of his discussion, he has argued that Renaissance society was familiar with the notion of constructed families, which began with 'milk parents' then godparents. 78 This idea extended to the upper echelons of spiritual and secular administration. 79 The government of the Republic of Venice, of course, was headed by a married couple: the doge and dogaressa. The metaphor of the family was used widely, bridging political and religious imagery. Family structures, therefore, could emulate out from the natural, nuclear family. On the purpose of this larger family, Terpstra has written that Renaissance parents sent their children: into larger families who would help shelter, feed, educate and raise the children better than any single set of parents could. These larger families might be related by blood or marriage but frequently were not. 80 Terpstra's idea of a public family there to help when the private family could not cope complements studies of Catholic Reformation responses to poverty, which included the establishment of a number of charitable institutions modelled around notions of kinship. 81 The neglect of the idea of the family in the context of early modern Catholic welfare and medical institutions may draw from the association of care with the religious orders but in this context too the imagery of the family was pervasive. 82 These institutions took on some responsibilities of the domestic sphere: arranging work, providing food and heating, and even organizing marriages. The family unit is one which has often been seen in opposition to centralized charitable institutions, albeit with the two structures working within a 'mixed economy of welfare' but it is clear that the former influenced the latter in a number of practical and symbolic ways.
Thus far we have seen that the unit and idea of the family shaped women's roles in the Venetian Republic's public health structures, as well as the structures themselves. Inheritance of medical cures meant that women could be the valued owners or administrators of medical secrets. Such treatments are elements of public health hitherto largely neglected but were valuable cures. The only extensive consideration of medical secrets for the plague considers them to be examples of 'pseudo' rather than 'official' medicine. A reconsideration of this distinction is, however, essential; as we have seen, far from being perceived as a purveyor of 'pseudo-medicine', the Colochi family was employed as a part of the official public health structures of the state because of the value attributed to their medical secret. The role that families played in public health not only reveals the contribution of women but also shows the state's involvement in a different light, illustrating that official medicine was not exclusively masculine.

SECRET SELLING AND THE NATURE OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Medical secrets were an established part of the system of early modern medical pluralism. The Venetian Health Office archive contains a number of surviving petitions and copies of secrets, which addressed a variety of ailments, including worms, problems in the stomach or legs, the mal francese and problems with teeth and gums. 83 The submission of secrets to the Health Office as requests for privileges, reminiscent of the patents studied by Luca Molà in his work on the Venetian silk industry, became more common towards the end of the sixteenth century and continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 84 Most of the supplications to the Health Office, therefore, were designed to protect profit and ownership for individuals and are of the type which have been more generally studied in the historiography on early modern medical and scientific secrets and associated with commercialism. 85 Although plague was an epidemic disease, responses to it were a permanent feature of early modern public health policies, which incorporated preventative as well as responsive measures; concern about the plague was endemic even if the disease was not. 86 A particular feature of late sixteenth-century public health for the plague was that a number of offers, like that of Olivieri, were made to the Republic for secrets to be purchased. The medical secrets which were offered to cities were considered to be suitable for official ownership in the common good. These cures were limited in number when compared to the printed versions of the marketplace but nevertheless provide a useful collection of remedies, which can work as a window onto the nature of public health and its practitioners in this period. Thirteen secrets survive which were offered for sale to the Venetian Republic. The Health Office archive does not preserve the full recipes of all of these secrets. Some cures were notorious enough to be described in other sources, illustrating that medical 'secrets' could, in fact, be well known and details of the treatments circulated within cities in printed forms, as we have seen in the case of the Colochi remedy, as well as oral discourses. Secrets also featured in vivid, literary accounts of plague epidemics. 87 This may have contributed to their characterization as 'pseudo' rather than 'official' medicine by Paolo Preto in what is the only detailed consideration of these cures for early modern Venice. Such a grouping is, however, unhelpful. 88 Preto's distinction obscures the fact that his 'official' treatments were printed in the form of medical treatises whereas the 'pseudo medicinal' cures were those offered for sale to the Venetian state. As we have seen, these 'pseudo medicinal' cures could form an important part of public health measures in Venice.
The division between official public health and 'pseudo medicinal' secrets has been informed by, and in turn contributed to, the view of early modern states as bodies concerned with controlling the licensing of medicine. This interpretation has been supported by assessments of the development of branches of government authority, Colleges of Physicians and Protomedicato tribunals which, it has been claimed, 'all represented state authority'. 89 Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones writing about early modern France asserted that, 'Guilds and similar corporate bodies became agents of central government alongside the bureaucracy and municipal authorities . . . the core of the medical world was skilfully sewn into the fabric of the early modern state.' 90 Many previous studies have brought to light cases in which female healers fell foul of political or ecclesiastical authorities. 91 In addition to widening the impasse between 'official' and 'unofficial' medicine, this process has been seen to impose an increasingly patriarchal hierarchy upon the early modern medical system. Across a number of economic trades, the early modern state has been portrayed as a regulator, rather than facilitator, of innovation. 92 A consideration of secrets reminds us that the benefits for governments of encouraging and retaining innovations in technology and production were clear. Indeed, Venice's traditional trades had relied on a uniqueness, quality and creativity in production which had been protected by secrets for centuries -with Murano glass providing a particular case in point whereby 'the "secrets" . . . were considered a state affair'. 93 Secrets feature in diplomatic correspondence as objects for sale and of potential value to early modern governments as well as being at the heart of technology and commerce. 94 Although rarely emphasized by historians, employees of the Venetian Republic were prompted to act with this same idea in mind, with those of the Venetian Arsenal, for example, being encouraged to sell inventions to the city. 95 An emphasis upon innovation was also placed by the public magistracy responsible for public health, which recognized that medical secrets held the potential to cure not only a city but a territorial state in times of epidemic disease. Public health, therefore, could be more innovative in its practice than has been realized.