Translating for Practical Medical Knowledge. Inoculation through Manuscript and Print in Enlightenment Florence

From the 1750s onward, smallpox inoculation became the subject of an exceptional flow of information across Europe, engaging not only physicians but also what Jean-Baptiste Fressoz has termed the tribunal du public. In 1757, the Florentine physician Giovanni Targioni Tozzetti (1712-1783) published the Relazioni d'innesti di vaiuolo fatti in Firenze, reporting on inoculation experiments conducted at the request of Count de Richecourt. Among his personal papers survives an Italian handwritten translation of a section of The Analysis of Inoculation (1754) by James Kirkpatrick. An accompanying letter reveals that, under time pressure, Targioni Tozzetti commissioned this selective translation as a practical aid for composing his treatise. This paper uses this manuscript as a case study to explore translation as a material practice of knowledge-making in eighteenth-century medicine. Following the trajectory from the English printed book to the Italian manuscript and finally to the published Relazioni, it reconstructs a layered chain of media with distinct epistemic roles. The handwritten translation functioned as a private operational tool, while the printed text repositioned English medical knowledge within a new regime of public authority. A close reading shows how Targioni Tozzetti deliberately extracted only passages relevant to his experimental aims, reconfiguring them within the Tuscan institutional context. This partial translation enabled the social translation of a controversial practice: from a European debate to a Grand Ducal experimental programme. Translation emerges as an intellectual and material intervention that reshaped knowledge as it moved across languages, media, and political contexts.