Event: Situating Giuseppe Demarco in 18th-century Medicine and Neo-Latin Literature
Date: 17 November 2023
Time: 18:30
Venue: Reading Hall, National Library of Malta, Valletta
Speakers: Dr Jurgen Gatt and Skye Vassallo
This is the first lecture in the National Library of Malta Public Lectures Series 2023-2024, ‘Knowledge in the Making: Towards an Intellectual History of Early Modern Malta’. The series is organised in collaboration with the UM Department of Philosophy.
Giuseppe Demarco (1718-1789) is one of Malta’s most voluminous writers, and an outstanding medical figure of the 18th century. In spite of this, his works have largely gone unstudied and his place in Maltese intellectual history neglected. This paper aims to place some of Demarco’s oeuvre within the major contemporary trends in European scientific thought and literary trends. In the first part of this paper, we outline the main contemporary influences on Demarco’s physiology, namely the iatro-mechanism of F. Hoffmann and H. Boerhaave, as well as the vitalism of F. de Sauvages. We also suggest, therefore, that Demarco played a pivotal role in Maltese intellectual history, introducing contemporary medical ideas into the island. In the second part, we examine yet another aspect of Demarco’s published and unpublished writings: translations of medical works from vernacular languages (English and French) into Neo-Latin.
Jurgen R. Gatt is a medical doctor and classics scholar working as an Assistant Lecturer at G. F. Abela Junior College and at the Department of Classics and Archaeology at the University of Malta. He completed his PhD at UCL in 2020 and has published primarily on ancient Greek rhetoric, Greek medicine, and the epistemology of testimony. Currently he is completing his first monograph The Anatomy of Testimony in the Age of the Sophists (Liverpool University Press, 2024) and is about to publish an edited volume A Companion to Demarco’s De Cocholata (1760), for which he was awarded a fund by the National Book Council of Malta (2022).
Skye Vassallo is a graduate from the University of Malta, having completed her B.A. (Honours) in Classics with Philosophy in 2023. Her dissertation focused on cataloguing and examining the works of 18th-century Maltese physician Joseph Demarco, with a special interest in his use of Latin. She presented her findings at the Junior College AIMC Conference in September 2023. Together with a colleague, she teaches a Degree+ course in Ancient Greek Mythology. She plans to further her studies in Classics in the next years.
The National Library Public Lecture Series 2023-2024 is a collaboration between the National Library and the UM Department of Philosophy. The series is coordinated by Maroma Camilleri, Prof. Jean-Paul De Lucca and Mevrick Spiteri.
Free entrance. No booking required.
For more information, please send an email.
