Los pronosticos medicos en la medicina medieval: El "Tractatus de Crisi et de Diebus Creticis" de Bernardo de Gordonio (review)

Bernard de Gordon is best known for his Practica seu Lilium medicine (1305), but his Tractatus de crisi et de diebus creticis (1295) sheds a brighter light both on him and on early university medicine. Written at the University of Montpellier, it was copied dozens of times, translated into five languages, and eventually (from 1480 on) disseminated in print as Liber pronosticorum. The treatise covered "the entire art and science of predicting" (p. 436), which was at the heart of the Hippocratic legacy as well as of the curriculum—as prominent in medical training and practice as it has become peripheral in the modern classroom and clinic. The didactic framework of the compendium accounts for its formal structure, magisterial tone, and use of hypothetical cases. The practical relevance is unmistakable in every expounded step, from the collection and interpretation of information to the pronouncement of prospective developments and their application to treatment.

Bernard saw the master "key to all prognostication" in the ability to weigh the patient's strength or virtus against the assault of the morbus (p. 118). This ability hinged on diagnostic skills, but it required a far broader grasp of the patient's condition and circumstances, and of the nature and course of the particular ailment. In the course of any disease, the most relevant phase was the status or "apogee," during which the turning point or "crisis" determined the outcome. In the search for rational certainty, guided by the authority of Galen, turning points for various diseases were assigned to fixed times, the "critical days." This assignment relied on numerology and on the correspondence between earthly and celestial rhythms; hence, the physician needed to be familiar with the solar and lunar calendars and "at least with the nature and complexion of the [zodiacal] signs and the stars" (p. 420). It is worth noting that, in contrast with the common image of medieval prognostication, astrology occupied less than 7 percent of Bernard's discussion.

The contents and character of the Tractatus de crisi et creticis diebus become clearer thanks to the present painstaking and neat edition, even for this reviewer who has pored over Bernard's writings for decades. Alberto Alonso Guardo has identified fifty-nine complete and incomplete copies in manuscripts (I can now add five more), collated fifteen of these, and reconstructed a consistent reading. His diagram of the textual transmission, however, while credible, invites a few queries. There is confusion in the labeling of one branch as "z" for the stemma (pp. 95 and 107) and as "la familia x" in descriptions of individual codices (pp. 80-82, 85, and 93). The diagram might be too simplified to accommodate certain interesting manuscripts that were not consulted, such as Erfurt Amplonian Q 227 and London BL Sloane 334—which raises the question how exemplars were selected for collation. On the other hand, the stemma blurs the status of one problematic version, namely that in Paris manuscript Bibliothèque Nationale lat. 16189 (P in the Sigla). Even if P is too idiosyncratic to be helpful in reconstructing the text (p. 80), we should not overlook the potential significance of its divergent readings, many of which, routinely omitted in the apparatus, recur through the manuscript and add up to a lexical pattern: these include "alie" for "relique," "facit" for "generat," "dicendum" for "agendum," and so on. The distinct pattern, in conjunction with an early date (1313-15), suggests a separate origin for the Paris exemplar—perhaps in an initial draft or, most intriguingly, in lecture notes.

The Spanish translation, which accompanies the edition on facing pages, is fluent but rather free. In several instances, closer literalness could have served historical authenticity without surrendering intelligibility. Two examples will suffice. When Bernard, illustrating...