The clock and the mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance medicine

comprehend the subtleties of the history of sexuality, and its diverse psychological profiles: protean in sexuality's ability to disguise and transform itself while appearing as merely another internalized habit. So it was for the erotic Mann, who indulged his secret habit every week, every day, almost every hour of his life from early adulthood, and then retired, Kant-like, to the daily serenity of his orderly writing table and favourite pen. Mann's habit based on (what we would label) erotic homosexual attraction became his characteristic psychological insignia: specifically, the homoerotic moment framed by the male-male gaze, fleeting in its concorde brevity, fundamentally aesthetic for the sparks of pleasure it afforded Mann, regenerative in paving the way for his next paragraph or chapter, always politically charged and encoded in the symbolism of social class given the young men who attracted him, but rarely genital or indulging the physical tactile sense that granted would allow none of the lingering erotic desire implicated in the above crucial fallout of the encounter itself. This sequitur and fallout is what mattered to Mann. It counted more than any tactile fulfilment because these components of the secret fed directly into his literary art. After all, it is the male-male gaze between Aschenbach and Tadzio that virtually defines Death in Venice and Hans Castorp and his cousin Joachim in Magic mountain. Heilbut therefore provides his readers with a gift in the form of research and discovery. The only appropriate readerly response is applause for, and gratitude to, him for his honest labours in Middle European archives and the superb revaluation he brings to the protagonist and his large oeuvre. More locally within this journal's pages Heilbut's tour de force serves to remind us that we have hardly exhausted the approaches to a territory as complex as the history of medicine which will always dwell on human beings, great and small. Book publication cannot, of course, always aspire to this crucible of detective work and discovery. If it did, we might have less publication than we do ( a condition to be desired), and more of it conducted at this stratospheric level of revelation.