“A glorious case!” This enthusiastic shout escaped the mouth of the founder of clinical education, Professor Giovanni Battista da Monte, at the bedside of a man with a decomposing face, afflicted by uncontrollable tremors and covered with horrifying ulcers. This occurred in Padua in the year 1543 and was witnessed by medical students at the beginning of one of eight instruction sessions on the topic of the “French disease” at the municipal Hospital of St. Francis. Of course, we are not informed in detail regarding some of the circumstances surrounding this event, but the scene described is not entirely fictitious. The professor's commentary was captured by one of the medical students present, who evidently later provided this together with other commentaries to his colleague Johann Crato, who published them under the common Latin title “Consultationum medicarum opus” as a compilation of medical consultations. However, the individual cases captured in this anthology do not bear the designation “consultatio” but are instead called “consilium.” As will be demonstrated below, physicians during the early modern period viewed these terms as synonyms. In order to meet the objectives of this work however, it is necessary to differentiate these terms. Therefore, the genre of the 17th and 18th century will be called “consultation literature,” while “consilia literature” will be reserved for the analogous genre of the 16th century.

Da Monte's lecture at the bedside of the syphilis patient is not a typical consilium, neither in the way we perceive it today, nor in what this word meant in the 16th century.