Medicine in the Renaissance City (review)

The healing power of nature inspires the Latin treatises edited in this volume. The four texts share the theoretical constructs and practical concerns of twelfth- and thirteenth-century medicine, but they also exemplify a broad diversity of objectives and contexts. In the first, a guide for bedside conduct, the Salernitan master Archimatheus emphasizes the importance, for both physician and patient, of a trusting relationship. The instructions pertain only to house calls, which were reserved for the privileged (only in the Middle Ages?), thus reminding us of the social selectivity of learned practitioners. Medical learning is also geared to practice, albeit more indirectly, in the second text, an abstract by Bernard de Gordon of authoritative teaching on the treatment of acute diseases. Resolving my quandary of more than two decades ago, the editor cogently argues that Bernard intended to summarize neither his own full-length treatise nor the concise Hippocratic regimen of acute diseases, but Galen's elaboration, which was a core text in the curriculum. This Scholastic effort, undertaken when Bernard was still a bachelor in medicine, foreshadowed the preoccupation with organized thinking that characterized his productive career at the University of Montpellier. The same university milieu produced a body of writings on signs, causes, and cures of reproductive problems, which is represented in the third section of the volume. Between its inception and publication, this section became largely redundant because of ongoing editions by Enrique Montero Cartelle.

Printed here for the first time, on the contrary, is the fourth text, a substantial treatise on eye diseases that was probably compiled some time after 1250. Its descriptions and cures are drawn from more than a dozen written sources, from the oral testimony of matrons as well as physicians, and from personal experience. The compilation follows Scholastic physiology and methodology, with empirical recipes favored slightly more than in academic pharmacopoeias. Although the treatments are anatomically focused, they are suffused with Hippocratic holism, and they include virtually no surgical interventions. The writer, a "poor cloistered" sexagenarian who once studied in Paris (p. 157), is mindful of indigent patients who, unable to afford exotic medicines or elaborate preparations, might be helped by wayside herbs, such as betony or fennel, steeped in some wine. This treatise is interesting on several levels, and it proves that a lifelong interest in eye diseases could bring a layman's knowledge of medicinal treatments to "ein gutes Niveau" (p. 66).

The editions give us convenient and reliable access to valuable source material. They are based on a manuscript now in Paris and on a few supplementary versions. A check of this manuscript (in my photocopies) reveals only an occasional error or oversight—for example, the readings in P, "insufflet" and "a proprietate" (actually for "a proximitate"), though more sensible, are not noted for II 1 (p. 74). The editor has collated variants and verified citations with so much care that exacting readers may wonder about his avowed inability to consult several handwritten or early printed sources, even when copies are held by German libraries from Erfurt to Munich. Had he been able to see the pristine manuscript of Bernard de Gordon's compendium in the Cusanus Stift in Bernkastel-Kues on the Mosel, it would have afforded a virtually definitive edition—as well as delightful memories. Grensemann's "philologia," intensified by the acknowledged counsel of three distinguished fellow historians of medicine, is also leavened by a sense of humor: thus, when he is not sure whether "priapus tauri" refers to an animal part or a kind of orchid in a "divinely revealed" counterpart...