Canonical Medicine: Gentile da Foligno and Scholasticism (review)

"Subtilissimus rimator verborum Avicenne" (that most subtle investigator of Avicenna's teachings)—so Gentile da Foligno was described in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Long after Gentile's death in 1348, his remarkable achievement was evidently still famous. Uniquely among scholastic medical masters, he had labored to produce a commentary covering all five books of Avicenna's Canon, the comprehensive, elaborately structured encyclopedia that was one of the mainstays of late-medieval academic medicine. Roger French has read through those commentaries, all three-million-plus words of them, in order to re-create Gentile's interpretation of Avicenna, an interpretation that reworked the Canon into scholastic canons of practice.

Gentile's Canon-commentaries evolved over the course of his teaching career of thirty-odd years (primarily at the Perugia studium), and though it might have been possible to use them to explore his intellectual development—for example, by seeing whether some parts of the commentary but not others made use of the Galenic translations that Niccolò da Reggio was producing in Gentile's lifetime—French chooses to present Gentile's thought rather as a unitary system. He situates it carefully and revealingly within the academic setting that called it forth, in the process giving a fascinating description of the technical problems Gentile confronted in explicating a translation from the Arabic. French insists that at the heart of Gentile's system lay complexion theory: he describes that theory's principles and its rootedness in logic and natural philosophy, and goes on to give a splendid account, a far fuller and more detailed discussion than I have ever encountered before, of how it directed the preparation and administration of medicinal remedies, and yielded canons of cure that carried the authority of rational necessity.

This scholastic medicine was mastered in order to be used, French makes plain, but he sees its usefulness as of a peculiar kind: it comprised "the Good Story that the Learned and Rational Doctor could tell his patient and negotiate his professional place in society" (p. 89). These ironic capitals are used throughout the book, giving the impression that Gentile set out the views that he did, not because he thought they were true, but because "he was not blind to the Good Story and the market value of Reason and Learning" (p. 144). At only one point (p. 141) does French allow briefly that Gentile might actually have believed in his medicine, before returning to this theme of the value of learning for occupational advancement. It was the power of the Good Story over their patients, he argues, that enabled Gentile and other Learned and Rational Doctors to "colonise" (another favorite figure) or assimilate pre-Scholastic medical tradition and nonuniversity medicine to their own. To some extent this is certainly true. Yet the difficulty with such a systematic deconstruction of Scholastic medical narrative is that it then becomes harder to justify using it as a truthful record of Gentile's practice when that becomes desirable: French's discussion of his treatment of a case of snake-bite wavers between presenting it as a trustworthy record of procedures and "an account designed to reflect well on the particular doctor who wrote it" (p. 242). The two are not entirely inconsistent, of course, but the stronger one believes the element of self-promotion to be in medical writing, the less secure is the status of the Good Story as a record of practice. How far Gentile actually put his canons into practice ends up escaping our grasp.

An illuminating book, then, and a stimulating and provocative one, but also an exasperating one. Its editorial carelessness is terribly distracting. I was brought up short at least a dozen times, uncomprehending, when a word proved somehow to have dropped out of the text: "here he deals [with] problems of text...