Ancients and Moderns in the Medical Sciences: From Hippocrates to Harvey (review)

Roger French. Ancients and Moderns in the Medical Sciences: From Hippocrates to Harvey. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Variorum, 2000. xxii + 280 pp. Ill. $99.95 (0-86078-834-2).

The twelve articles in this volume were originally published between 1978 and 1997, and most of them are readily accessible in prominent journals. The collection is more than the sum of its parts, however, because it affords a panoramic view of the author's scholarship and, more important, an appreciation of its intellectual consistency across two decades. Roger French's broader erudition and more substantial publications, on subjects ranging from the earliest medical curriculum to Harvey's natural philosophy, are merely adumbrated in various essays, but all his work is evidently driven by the same passion and logic. At the heart of every thesis and argument is a keen interest in texts, preferably fragments or marginal notations, and in their physical appearance and fortune as historical clues no less valuable than their contents. Even so, "the career of ancient medical writings" from late antiquity to the seventeenth century, proposed as unifying theme in the introduction (p. [vii]), underrepresents the scope of the studies.

Substantial and interwoven themes that give coherence to the volume include school medicine, the teaching of anatomy, and objectives in practice. Commentaries on leading authors, and formal introductions to them (accessus ad auctores), reveal that Scholasticism was not incompatible with observation, and that a Schoolman such as Gentile da Foligno posted anatomical knowledge at the head of the physicians' path (via medicorum) to rational treatment. The Scholastic view of anatomy as conceptual division, and as anchored more securely in written tradition than in sense perception, obviously slowed down empirical exploration; paradoxically, tradition might just as well have stimulated research if it had not been impaired by the defective transmission of Galen's crucial works. The nexus between academic anatomy and bedside practice is highlighted in a perceptive if partial analysis of the medical ethics of Gabriel Zerbi. Theoretical and practical concerns are further linked in examinations of prognosis, which was once as central as it is now marginal, and whose recourse to astrology smoothed the entry of astronomy from Greek and Arabic sources into Latin science.

When the folk tongue began to spread through learned medicine in the Middle Ages, compositions on therapeutics--and practical passages in theoretical treatises--were the first to be affected. A new age began in the seventeenth century, when the vernacular became an integral part of scientific demonstration, as French argues in a sparkling article on Harvey. By this time, too, the pursuit of medical knowledge was reaching far beyond textual tradition and scholastic apparatus. We can more fully appreciate the change as well as its antecedents, thanks to Ancients and Moderns.

Luke Demaitre
University of Virginia, Charlottesville

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