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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 120-122



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Book Review

Medicine and Religion c. 1300. The Case of Arnau de Vilanova


Medicine and Religion c. 1300. The Case of Arnau de Vilanova. By Joseph Ziegler. [Oxford Historical Monographs.] (New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. x, 342. $80.00.)

In his odious defense of the Inquisition, Historia de los Heterodoxos Españoles, the nineteenth-century scholar Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo implies [End Page 120] that appearances before ecclesiastical tribunals were an honor for those summoned--and doubly so for those acquitted. Scholars who stayed away from religion could thus pursue their researches in peace, with nothing to fear.

The temptations of theology were too great to resist. Since the dawn of the institutional Church, the greatest brains of each generation had felt the magnetic pull of religious debate. By the medieval period, medical men too had begun dabbling in the field (from their perspective, their surgical discoveries showed them the keys to God's creation). But their anatomical insights lured them into flights of oratorical fancy that would prove their downfall. Michael Servetus (d. 1553) is the best example of this.

Church Fathers referred to our Savior as "the antidote to all sins," the ultimate physician; in some medically-oriented medieval sermons, Jesus performed urinalysis! In analyzing the writings of the Catalan physician and theologian Arnau de Vilanova and his contemporaries, Joseph Ziegler astutely describes the rich cross-fertilization between medical and religious language at the dawn of the Renaissance.

Fourteenth-century doctors were still in the thrall of Dark Age superstition, numerology, and hocus-pocus (common concerns were: might surgery harm a man's soul?; did the Last Rights provide temporary physical relief from terminal illness?). Arnau de Vilanova helped to pioneer a faculty of medicine at Montpellier in the late 1200's. Arnau, a reformer, rejected direct cause-and-effect relationships between sickness and divine displeasure, adopting a more rational philosophy. However, he left the door open for divine revelation as a tool in a physician's armory (academic credentials were only part of the picture). Doctors to this day rely on their "instincts"--we would call them hunches. This distinctive and somewhat flexible approach toward professional activity Arnau subsequently extended to theological analysis, which a lay person (as Arnau himself was) had the right, at least in theory, to perform. This was a dangerous manifesto in the Middle Ages.

At all events, a new era was beckoning, with the discernible hope that evidence-based medicine might sweep away folk remedies and old wives' tales. But as a man of his time, Arnau hedged his bets and relied also on more conventional techniques, including syllogism, and the inevitable citations from the volumes of Galen and Avicenna--remarkable men who wrote a good deal of nonsense.

Herein lie some questions for the modern reader, falling beyond the scope of Ziegler's essay, which does not address the merits of therapeutic methods. Beautifully calligraphed textbooks never cured a sick child of the plague; accordingly, by what objective criteria are medieval doctors to be judged? Patient survival, although never exactly irrelevant, was seldom of sole concern to the various medical commentators depicted in this book. For medieval thinkers (less so for Arnau), the urge to moralize and strike analogies is too powerful. The issue of patient outcomes does, however, arise with the Carthusian monastic order, where Arnau credits the monks' longevity to their vegetarian diet! [End Page 121]

Ziegler indicates that Arnau made enemies; but is it so hard to see why? Arnau was a prolific and boldly self-confident author who drenched his adversaries with scathing medical insults (accusing them of sterilitas mentis, and worse besides). He curried favor with the powerful, including Pope Boniface VIII. Mysterious resurrection stories began to attach themselves to him. In one account (very loosely based on fact), a patient went on a hunger strike (the man considered himself dead, so why eat?); and Arnau escorted this man to a graveyard, where black-cloaked confederates (also...

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