Medicine in a Multicultural Society: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Practitioners in the Spanish Kingdoms, 1222-1610 (review)

Luis García-Ballester. Medicine in a Multicultural Society: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Practitioners in the Spanish Kingdoms, 1222-1610. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Variorum, 2001. xii + 374 pp. $117.95 (0-86078-845-8).

This collection of nine studies (all of which have been published during the last seventeen years) should have appeared in celebration of Luis García-Ballester's sixty-fifth birthday. The untimely death of this great historian of medieval science and medicine has turned this book into a monument in memory of a scholar who has transformed our knowledge of medieval medicine in general, and of its Iberian context in particular. García-Ballester was a very sensitive and humane historian, and these characteristics suffuse every article in this collection. He was constantly aware that the history of medieval medicine can only be written properly in its broader social, cultural, and religious contexts. Each article lucidly links the particular medical topic to these broader contexts and thus becomes a significant contribution to general historians, not just to historians of medicine.

This collection centers on the encounter in the medical arena of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim cultures on the Iberian peninsula between the thirteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. It is a story that starts with a fruitful exchange of knowledge between different systems of medicine, which nevertheless had much in common. It ends with the creation of a vast society ruled by the Spanish crown, a society that may have gained in uniformity and cohesion, but that lost in freedom and openness, and that brought about the disintegration of the medical systems of the religious minorities.

The three opening essays deal with the Christian context of medicine in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Iberia. The first discusses the enigma of the apparent lack of interest in the new medical science, within Christian institutions in the Castile of Alfonso X. This is all the more intriguing when one compares Castile with Aragon and takes into account the role of certain cultural centers in Castile (Toledo, for example) as the source of much of this new medical knowledge. The second essay (a revised version of a paper first published in Spanish) reiterates this enigma by revealing the sophisticated and rich intellectual output and interest in the natural sciences (including medicine) of the Franciscan and Dominican studia of Santiago de Compostela in the 1220s. Here García-Ballester analyzes the registers of the episcopal library of Santiago and places his findings in the broad context of the Mendicants as agents of the dissemination and assimilation of the new science in the first half of the thirteenth century. The invaluable insights he supplies, through comparisons with the northern scene in England and France, enable him to detect a hitherto unknown center of scientific activity in medieval Spain. He shows that early-thirteenth-century Galician Mendicants were at the forefront of scientific knowledge in Latin Christendom, and he asks why, despite this brilliant beginning (which preceded similar developments in the Mendicant studia at Oxford and Paris), Santiago did not persist in this development, and why Castile of the late thirteenth century assimilated the fruits of the new science and learning in a limited and halting fashion. The third essay (written in collaboration with Michael R. McVaugh and Agustín Rubio Vela) displays the rich and sophisticated medical system in fourteenth-century Valencia. Through meticulous analysis of a wealth of archival material, the authors reconstruct the Valencian licensing policies and regulation of medical learning.

The second part of the book comprises four studies on the interaction of Jews with Christians in the medical arena of medieval Spain. From the late 1320s onward, the Latin system of medical learning established itself in the eyes of Jewish practitioners as a model to be imitated and a resource...