CODRONCHI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA. - Italian physician, b. at Imola in 1547, d. in 1628. He studied at the University of Bologna and practised in his native city, where he held very important offices. Having become a widower in 1618, he entered the priesthood under the impulse of the mystical ideas he had always cultivated. A friend of and in contact with the foremost physicians of his time, he cultivated medicine in all its branches, excelling, however, in forensic medicine—a discipline in which he must be considered a pioneer together with Ingrassia and Fedele—and in medical deontology, morals, and ethics. He was also a pioneer of laryngology, having written a De vitiis vocis (Frankfurt 1597).
His principal works are: in forensic medicine, the De morbis veneficis ac veneficis, etc. (Venice 1595) and the Methodus testificandi (1597); in medical deontology and ethics, the De christiana ac tuta medendi ratione, etc. (Ferrura 1591), in which he bases the physician’s activity upon the strictest observance of Christian morality. This same work had previously been written by him in Italian, under the title Cases of conscience pertaining to physicians, principally, and also to the sick, nurses, and the healthy, etc., and published in Venice in 1589 in Man’s spiritual journeys, etc., by Fr. Tiberio Codronco.
vitiis vocis », in Il Valsalva, 5 (1929), pp. 797-99; A. Pazzini, Metamorphosis... dal Codice di Hammurabi al « De christiana ac tuta medendi ratione », in Riv. st. delle scienze mediche e naturali, 1931, III-VI, pp. 64-88, 171-53; id., Storia della medicina, I, Milan 1947, p. 700 ff. Adalberto Pazzini