Ut Dicunt Medici: Medical Knowledge and Theological Debates in the Second Half of the Thirteenth Century

During the second half of the thirteenth century, the teaching and learning of medicine began to imitate the scholastic style and methods. This enabled physicians to support the claim of medicine to be one of the higher branches of learning and led to the full incorporation of medicine into the academic system. ¹ The introduction of the scholastic method had both advantages and disadvantages. It fostered critical comparisons of statements in supposedly authoritative texts (even though the goal was usually reconciliation), and it developed the habit of rational analysis. It demonstrated that any authoritative statement could be questioned. But it also encouraged an excessive expenditure of ingenuity in elaborating intricate arguments about textual interpretation, and it focused attention on issues to which observation was largely irrelevant. ² Medical scholasticism had its critics, one of whom was Roger Bacon. Bacon did not reject the new translations of Arabic medical and pharmaceutical works, but neither did he embrace Hippocrates and Galen, nor apply Aristotle’s methodology to them, as the schoolmen were doing under the spell of Avicenna. ³ Others openly condemned the excessive litigiousness of physicians, their indulgence in hair-splitting, and their futile, barren discussions, in which they assessed each other’s competence by their ability to argue, not by the efficacy of their treatments. ⁴

Since the methods of investigation that were used to elucidate doctrinal statements about the Christian religion were equally applicable to statements on every other subject, anyone who had mastered the scholastic method could move from one subject to another with relatively little difficulty. Consequently, there emerged an intricate web of interdisciplinarian scholars who were active in more than one field. This led Richard Southern recently to assert that the leading scientists and the leading theologians were often the same men, and that the union of science and theology arose from the familiarity of theologians with all the basic forms of secular learning. ⁵

And what about medicine? Did the fact that, from the latter part of the thirteenth century onward, physicians and the rest of the academic world came to use the same logical constructs and analytical methods, facilitate an interdisciplinary dialogue between physicians and theologians? One of the ways to answer this question is to examine the density and the level of medical knowledge incorporated by theologians into their texts. To my knowledge, this question has never been systematically treated. We know that high-level medical knowledge infiltrated religious discourse via the new thirteenth-century encyclopedic literature and the preachers’ manuals that used it. Preachers came to employ in their moral analogies a wider range of medical topics and used sophisticated medical examples and citations attributed to named medical authorities. ⁶ The following discussion supplements these findings and suggests that it is possible to expand their conclusion beyond the level of sermons and preaching, into the heart of scholastic theology. Paul Oskar Kristeller and Nancy Siraisi have demonstrated the close relationship between medicine and natural philosophy particularly in the Italian universities. Taddeo Alderotti (d. 1295) and his pupils based their medical learning firmly upon contemporary philosophy and science and were adept in applying specific parts of these disciplines to medical theory. These philosophizing learned physicians developed and adopted various practical and theoretical innovations in the medical art. ⁷ I suggest that the nature of the relationship between medicine and theology in those universities that taught both topics needs to be addressed as well, if we wish to grasp fully the broad intellectual context in which scholastic medicine flourished.

The work of three scholars who have made useful contributions to our knowledge of the issue provides a beneficial starting point for my study. Kari Børresen showed how, in the context of the debate on Marian anthropology, Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus relied on Aristotelian embryology and physiology, while Bonaventure and Duns Scotus used the equivalent Galenic theories. ⁸ Peter Biller has shown the infiltration of medical scientific terms into the discussion of Jews in some quodlibets from Paris of ca. 1300 (mainly the concept of...