Giovanni Antonio Scopoli's De Hydrargyro Idriensi Tentamina (1761): Mercury Mining, Mercurialism, and Preventive Reasoning in Eighteenth‐Century Occupational Medicine

Abstract

Giovanni Antonio Scopoli (1723-1788), a physician-naturalist of the Enlightenment, is primarily remembered for his contributions to botany and entomology. Less attention has been paid to his medical work De hydrargyro Idriensi Tentamina physico-chymico-medica (1761), written during his fifteen years of service as physician at the mercury mines of Idrija (present-day Slovenia). Its third section, De morbis fossorum hydrargyri, offers a detailed occupational-medical account of disorders and diseases among mercury miners and smelter workers, including tremor, salivation, stomatitis, respiratory disorders, and other conditions associated with mining labor. This article reassesses Scopoli's work within the history of occupational medicine, comparing his site-specific approach with the broader nosology of Bernardino Ramazzini and the later reform-oriented tradition associated with 19th-century industrial medicine. Rather than presenting Scopoli as a neglected founder of the discipline, we argue that the Tentamina represents a distinctive 18th-century form of occupational-medical inquiry: a monographic, workplace-based, clinically grounded study that linked toxic exposure, working conditions, and prevention before the emergence of modern industrial toxicology. The work remains substantially unknown in Anglophone historiography and deserves wider recognition as a significant example of pre-industrial occupational-medical inquiry.