Health and Medicine in Early Medieval Southern Italy (review)

Patricia Skinner. Health and Medicine in Early Medieval Southern Italy. The Medieval Mediterranean: Peoples, Economies, and Cultures, 400-1453, vol. 11. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997. xvii + 183 pp. Tables. $65.75; Nlg. 105.00.

In the introduction to her book, Patricia Skinner gives the outlines of an ambitious program: she intends "to understand the day-to-day health problems of the rich and poor" (p. xi), in Southern Italy, from the ninth century to the creation of the Norman Kingdom (1160). Her purpose is to "broaden the definition of medical history" (p. xiv), by including information about the environment in which people lived, their diet, the place of sick persons within social communities, the resort to medical doctors or alternative cures, and so forth. This program is actually fulfilled as far as the chapter headings are concerned. The book is, indeed, divided into three parts: "Individual and Environment"; "Mentalities and Healthcare"; and "Medical Achievement: Southern Italy in Context." In part 1, the topics of food and famine, housing, bathing, pregnancy, and childrearing are tackled. Part 2 deals with the place of sick people in society and mentalities, medical practioners, and, finally, mortality and burials. In part 3 are summed up the favorable conditions that led to the rise of the Salernitan medical school.

There is no doubt that the suggested program and the chapter headings are attractive. Unfortunately, the reader is left somewhat disappointed, since the book offers more questions than answers. Often, not even the beginning of an answer can be found: "Once again we are at the mercy of the skewed survival of evidence when it comes to discussing environmental factors in health" (p. 38); "One of the most prevalent problems for the inhabitants of Southern Italy may have been frequent bouts of malaria, but these are not recorded in the documents" (p. 64); "The difficulty of gleaning information from cemetery sites is compounded by the fact that cremation was often used rather than burial to dispose of the dead" (p. 108); and so on. The frequency of this kind of lucid, but disappointing, conclusion means that the questions raised did not fit with the available information. As is stated in the introduction, and as is attested throughout the book, very little new material was used: "the key lies in combining sources of information which have previously been studied in isolation from each other" (p. xvii). The point is that, even when they are combined in a subtle way, these sources do not shed more light than when they are isolated. Apart from some scattered evidence derived from records of individuals' transactions, concerning medical practice in Naples and Salerno before the twelfth century, the void of actual information is more often than not filled with extrapolations and assumptions.

Despite all these limitations, the merit of Skinner's book is that it comforts historians in their conviction that Southern Italy played an important part in the development of Western medical practice. They knew already that the so-called school of Salerno was not a "school" in the modern sense of the word, and that there were some good reasons--cultural, social, and political--that explain its rise and fame, but it was worthwhile to repeat this information and to put it in its proper context. In sum, this is certainly a book that stimulates the imagination and helps to move the history of Salernitan medicine beyond legend, but it suffers from an irreducible incongruence between its author's questioning and the material provided by the available sources.

Danielle Jacquart
École pratique des Hautes Études
Paris

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