Ruggieri Mistakenly Drinks Anesthetic Intended for Surgery

Ruggieri Mistakenly Drinks Anesthetic Intended for Surgery is the turning point in a secret visit: an opiate prepared to make a patient sleep through an operation instead incapacitates Ruggieri, and his lover mistakes the resulting stillness for death. The mishap grows from an interruption in Master Mazzeo della Montagna’s medical work and exposes how quickly a hidden affair can become a private emergency.

Medical Preparation and Interruption

A patient with a gangrenous leg has a decayed bone that Master Mazzeo says must be removed; otherwise, the whole limb must be cut off or the patient will die. The patient’s relatives consent to the operation. Because the doctor judges that the patient might not endure the pain or submit to the procedure while awake, he prepares a medicinal water intended to keep him asleep for as long as the operation requires.

Master Mazzeo plans to operate at evensong and leaves the prepared water in his chamber without telling anyone what it is. Before he can attend to the patient, however, a messenger arrives from his friends at Malfi, where a fray has left several people wounded. The doctor postpones the operation until the next morning and goes by boat to Malfi. His departure leaves the medicine behind, its purpose unknown to the other people in the house.

The Secret Visit

Master Mazzeo’s wife knows that her husband will not return that night. As she has done before, she sends for Ruggieri da Jeroli, her lover, and brings him into her chamber. She locks him in while waiting for the other members of the household to go to sleep, making the visit dependent on secrecy and on the doctor’s absence.

Ruggieri waits in the chamber. The account suggests that fatigue, salted meat, or habit may have made him thirsty; he sees the flagon standing in the window and takes it for drinking water. Without knowing that it is the physician’s preparation for the patient, he drinks the whole contents.

Sleep Mistaken for Death

The opiate soon overcomes Ruggieri, and he falls asleep on a chest. When the woman enters the chamber, she nudges him and quietly urges him to get up. He does not answer or move. Her sharper efforts send him tumbling from the chest to the floor, but he gives no sign of life.

Alarmed, she shakes him, tugs his nose and beard, pinches him, and burns his flesh with a lighted taper. None of these attempts rouses him. Although she is the wife of a physician, she is no doctor herself; unable to identify the drug’s effect, she concludes that Ruggieri is truly dead. Loving him above all else, she silently weeps over what she takes to be a terrible misfortune, afraid to cry out and summon the household.

Narrative Turn

The scene’s irony lies in the difference between the actual cause of Ruggieri’s stillness and the explanation his lover reaches. A doctor’s carefully prepared remedy, left behind because a summons diverts him from surgery, becomes the instrument of an apparent death in a concealed bedroom. The event shifts the affair from a planned private meeting to a crisis that the woman must confront without understanding what has happened; at this point, the narrative establishes her grief and fear, not Ruggieri’s eventual fate.