The sleeping draught prepared by Master Mazzeo

The sleeping draught prepared by Master Mazzeo della Montagna is a physician’s carefully prepared opiate whose intended use is practical and limited: to spare a patient the pain and resistance that might prevent surgery. When the doctor is called away before the operation, however, the potion is left where another man mistakes it for ordinary water. Its accidental use transforms a medical instrument into the apparent evidence of a death.

Preparation and Intended Use

A patient under Master Mazzeo della Montagna’s care has a gangrened leg containing a decayed bone. The doctor tells the patient’s kin that the bone must be removed: without the operation, the patient will either lose the whole limb or die, while extraction may allow him to recover. The relatives consent to the procedure and entrust the patient to the doctor, who accepts the case only at grave risk.

Master Mazzeo della Montagna expects that the patient cannot bear the pain and will not submit to the operation while awake. He therefore prepares a composed water that will put the patient to sleep for as long as the surgery requires. The intended procedure is set for evensong. The doctor distils the draught that morning, brings it home, and places it in his chamber without telling anyone what it is. Its placement, not any failure of its intended medical function, creates the danger: the potion is accessible to someone who has no reason to recognize it.

An Interruption and a Mistaken Drink

At the appointed hour, a messenger summons Master Mazzeo della Montagna to Malfi, where a great fray has left many wounded. He postpones the leg operation until the following morning and sets out by boat. His absence also changes the household’s use of the chamber. His wife, knowing he will not return that night, arranges for Ruggieri da Jeroli to come to her as usual and hides him in the room while other members of the household are still awake.

Waiting there, Ruggieri becomes thirsty. Whether from the day’s fatigue, the salt meat he had eaten, or habit, he notices the flask standing in the window and takes its contents for drinking water. He drinks all of it. The draught’s effect soon overtakes him: a heavy drowsiness comes on, and he falls asleep. The story gives no ingredient or further recipe, keeping attention on the potion’s preparation, its vulnerable storage, and the speed with which its intended medical effect takes hold in the wrong person.

The Appearance of Death

When Ruggieri’s lover enters the chamber, she tries to wake him quietly, then pushes him more forcefully. He does not answer or stir. Her efforts knock him from the chest on which he is lying, but even the fall elicits no sign of life. She shakes him, pulls his nose and beard, pinches him sharply, and burns his flesh with a lighted taper; nothing rouses him. Because she is no physician, she concludes that he is dead and silently grieves, afraid to make an outcry.

The draught thus produces a second, unplanned effect in the scene. It does not merely induce sleep; because its recipient is hidden and cannot be awakened, that sleep is mistaken for death. The contrast between the doctor’s controlled plan and the lover’s misreading gives the flask its plot force: what was prepared to make a dangerous operation possible now threatens to expose a secret affair through a body that appears lifeless.

Medical and Narrative Significance

The opening account of the 1348 plague in Florence describes physicians and medicines as largely powerless against a rapidly spreading disease. The sleeping draught belongs to a different episode and is not presented as a response to that epidemic: here, medical knowledge has a specific purpose, and the potion is designed to facilitate an operation rather than cure the illness by itself. The contrast makes the limits of the remedy clear. Its usefulness depends on correct preparation, placement, and administration; outside that planned setting, the same power becomes perilous.

As an object in the episode, the flask binds the medical plot to the household plot. The gangrened leg explains why the draught exists; the summons to Malfi leaves it behind; the concealed meeting puts Ruggieri within reach of it; and his mistaken drink turns an ordinary container of medicine into a convincing semblance of death. The passage ends with the lover mourning him, leaving the crisis unresolved at this point in the account.