Explores Nicola Caputi’s scientific writings to reveal how his studies of tarantism, local flora, and environmental health exemplify the integration of local observation and experimental practice within early eighteenth-century scientific culture in the Kingdom of Naples.
The Situated Science of Nicola Caputi provides the first systematic study of the intellectual trajectory of Nicola Caputi (1696–1761), a physician from Salento whose work illustrates the role of local observers in the making of eighteenth-century science. A member of the Neapolitan Academy of Sciences, Caputi combined the empirical study of natural phenomena with explicit reflections on the credibility of testimony and the authority of the witness. His writings reveal how scientific knowledge could be constructed at the intersection of local practice, early eighteenth-century experimental philosophy, and European scholarly networks.
The core of Caputi’s production is the De tarantulae anatome et morsu (1741), a detailed treatise on the anatomy of the tarantula and on tarantism as a culturally and medically significant condition. Here Caputi employed the microscope to dissect hundreds of specimens, recorded case histories of the afflicted, and reflected on the epistemic role of the conterraneus author, the local witness uniquely authorized to interpret endemic diseases. Tarantism, with its strange symptoms, cyclical recurrence, and musical therapy, is presented as a wondrous phenomenon, situated between natural philosophy and medical practice, and explained through an experimental approach.
Caputi’s engagement with local natural knowledge extended further. In his Dissertatio de delfinio, composed at the time of his admission to the Neapolitan Academy in 1733, he investigated both the morphological characteristics and the pharmacological virtues of a Salentine plant against intermittent fevers, combining Tournefortian botanical categories with experimental analysis.. In the Guadina difesa (1751), he acted as expert consultant in a dispute over the edibility of fish from a coastal lake, defending its salubrity through direct measurement and hydrometric instruments of his own design. These works show Caputi’s ability to address pressing medical, environmental, and social issues through experimental practices anchored in his territory.
By presenting these three writings together, the book situates Caputi within the broader intellectual landscape of early eighteenth-century Neapolitan scientific culture and the European Republic of Letters. His work exemplifies a mode of situated science: knowledge rooted in a specific region but articulated with the tools and categories of early modern philosophy and medicine. Wonders and singular natural phenomena emerge here not as marginal curiosities but as central objects of experimental inquiry. Caputi’s case thus offers a fresh perspective on the creative role of peripheral regions in the history of science and medicine.
