Tradicion e innovacion de la medicina latina de la antiguedad y de la Alta Edad Media (review)

There is a wealth of information and a refreshingly rare manner of “going back to the texts to see what they say” in the essays by the twenty-two scholars represented in this collection of papers in French, Italian, German (1), Spanish, and English (2). The articles generally consider the broad implications of Latin medical texts, or of Latin medical tracts adapted or modified or translated in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Consequently, there are a number of important papers nestled within this assemblage, but I can mention here only some that stand out as particularly significant.

Vázquez Buján divides the compilation into four major blocks, of which the third, “El léxico médico,” contains some very important insights into why and how a technical vocabulary for medicine was slow to develop. D. R. Langslow (in English) selects certain terms from authors who include Cornelius Celsus, Theodorus Priscianus, and Cassius Felix to suggest what he calls “lexical borrowing,” “suffixation,” and similar topics, in order to delineate the continual development of a medical terminology from classical antiquity to about the sixth century A.D. As arid as this topic may seem to some readers, it forms the basic foundation of our understanding of Latin medical works, and of how words do change in nuance and meaning over the centuries.

Six scholars in block 1 consider briefly the history and dissemination of texts: Guy Sabbah on Cassius Felix; Jackie Pigeaud on Caelius Aurelianus; K.-D. Fischer on a Liber medicinalis by a Pseudo-Democritus; N. Palmieri on the late Latin version of Galen’s Ars medica, linking nicely with D. Jacquart’s acute observations on “Introductions” or “summaries” (the Isagogue literature) as they existed and were used by physicians in late antiquity; and B. Marie’s long essay on possible stemma for the descent of Celsus manuscripts, which does not add much to what we already know.

H. von Staden’s essay (in block 2, on texts and authors—one of two in English in the collection) on Celsus is encapsulated by one phrase: “[Celsus] shapes a subdued Roman version of the vigorous Greek traditions of first-person scientific rhetoric” (p. 117). Many of von Staden’s “vigorous Greek traditions” receive close attention in the following essay (in Italian) by I. Mazzini, whose Greek sources buttress exactly the points made by von Staden. This “block 2” is the strongest group of papers in the assemblage; it also includes P. Mudry’s expert evaluation (in French) of a “Hippocratic” influence on Celsus’s organization of diseases into “acute” and “chronic,” and of why that influence permeated Western medicine for so long.

These twenty-two essays in five languages show, once again, the international character of current studies in ancient medicine. Even if one’s Spanish is rusty, a perusal of the essay by M. C. Salazar and A. M. Hernández on medical lexicography in north Africa in late antiquity (pp. 241–52) pays rich dividends of insight into the curious process that is verbal adaptation. Also rewarding is the following article (pp. 253–66) by J. I. Blanco Pérez on the transformation of the Latin coxa into what became femur. All in all, Vázquez Buján is to be congratulated on assembling a generally excellent collection of papers, with very few “clinkers” among them. The calling of our attention to Cassius Felix, Caelius Aurelianus, Anthimus (on dietetics), Theodorus Priscianus, and the impact of Celsus and Pliny the Elder in the western Roman medicine of late antiquity is accomplished here in style. The final essay, by B. Lançon (in French) on how medical language seeps into Christian literature (pp. 331–41), is a fitting...