Stroke in Renaissance Time: The Case of Francesco I de’ Medici
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Francesco I de' Medici (1541-1587), the second Grand Duke of Tuscany, was one of the members of the Medici family who ruled Florence during the centuries of the Renaissance. When, in 1857, all members of the Medici family were exhumed and definitively buried in the place where they still lie buried today, a painter, Giuseppe Moricci (Florence 1806-1879), who attended the ceremony, depicted the corpse of Francesco I in a perfect state of preservation. The painting shows a right spastic hemiparesis with a facial droop, a claw-hand appearance, the right shoulder internally rotated, the calf muscle wasted and the clubfoot confirmed by an orthopedic footwear in the coffin. The hemiparesis and consequent disability were likely concealed when Francesco I was alive, since in official portraits the Grand Duke appeared in perfect physical condition. However, chronicles reported that he had suffered from malaria and syphilis. Later in his life, temper and behavioral changes as well as emotional instability were documented, together with handwriting deterioration and seizures. We postulate that Francesco I had suffered from a stroke consequent to syphilis, a new aggressive and rapidly spreading infectious disease at that time in Italy. Francesco's governmental skills were presumably altered due to these diseases. Disability consequent to stroke was likely concealed by official portrayers and biographers of Francesco I during his life, consistent with the King's two bodies theory common since the Middle Ages: while the King's physical body is destined to die, the political one is everlasting. Infectious diseases have remained a leading cause of stroke in underdeveloped countries until recently, but noncommunicable causes are now prevailing worldwide.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".