Review of : Benedetta Chizzolini, Between Cure and Control: Doctors, Convicts, and Slaves in Tuscan and Papal Galleys (16th–18th Centuries). De Gruyter, 2025.

Benedetta Chizzolini’s Between Cure and Control advances a clear and sustained thesis: early modern medical authority was shaped not only in hospitals and universities but also within coercive institutions, and these settings were central rather than peripheral to its formation. By examining medical practice in the Tuscan and Papal galleys between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the book argues that environments structured by forced labour, suspicion, and discipline offered conditions in which medical expertise acquired legal and institutional weight. The architecture of the book, which moves from an extensive conceptual reconstruction to archival chapters intended to apply it, reflects its origin in doctoral research. The analytical framework of medical vigilance provides strong coherence, but it also lends the empirical sections a demonstrative orientation. At times the materials appear organised to substantiate a pre-established framework rather than to reshape it. This imprint, already perceptible in the tension between the theoretical opening and the archival chapters, remains evident in the overall composition.