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A popular saying attributed to Aristotle states that 'medicine begins where philosophy ends'-but this principle does not seem entirely valid for the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when medicine and philosophy were considered to be integral parts of the same branch of knowledge. For this reason, although today medicine and philosophy are clearly distinct disciplines, historians of ideas cannot study them entirely separately. Indeed, since the early modern era was a period of profound revision of knowledge, probably only a truly interdisciplinary investigation can identify the conceptual shifts and transfers capable of reinstating medicine in its fundamental role in the development of civilisation and modern thought, in particular as a model of a rational knowledge aimed at improving the social good through a fitting interpretation of experience. This article intends to offer arguments in support of such a historiographical approach, and to illustrate certain interesting methodological ideas that emerge from a study in which the history of philosophy and history of medicine cross-pollinate. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Renaissance medicine had the peculiar capacity to integrate in an organic and functional weave even historical and antiquarian competencies next to those properly naturalistic and biological. This is mirrored by the widespread use of medical metaphors in the context of moral and political, civil and technical reflexions. Such is the case also for the management of waters and rivers. So while Agostino Bacci compares floods to a disease and the idraulic engineer to a physician who, unable to alter upstream the course of things, prepares valid defensive strategies, Machiavelli gives literary dignity to the description of fortune like a river in flood that threatens to overwhelm and destroy everything.Their common recognition of a connection between the works of hydraulic engineering and the complex relationship between power and human freedom, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, luck or necessity, can be set, as we shall show, in the perspective of a new ideal of science, for which the profile of Bacci's "doctor of the river" partly overlaps with Machiavelli's virtuoso — a science that places in the middle of its investigation a critical survey of experience, and that is partly inspired by a certain way of doing medicine, partly by a certain way to read the history, and that focuses on the complexity of a world, natural as social, which rebels against too rigid schematizations.

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