No Vaccine

What then of medicine? Petrarch was famously skeptical about physicians who claimed too much certainty and authority. He believed that physicians needed to acknowledge their own ignorance as a first step towards knowing anything. Ignorance itself was “pestiferous”, a disease to be rooted out and eradicated even if there was no vaccine. While professing great respect for the art of healing, he had no patience with what he slyly dubbed “pestilential incompetence” in his Invectives against the Physician. Plague alone did not reveal medicine’s failure but it brought its limits into stark relief.