The Art of Medicine: Medical Teaching at the University of Paris, 1250-1400 (review)

Cornelius O'Boyle. The Art of Medicine: Medical Teaching at the University of Paris, 1250-1400. Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, vol. 9. Leiden: Brill, 1998. xv + 330 pp. Ill. $113.00; Nlg. 192.00.

At the first faculties of medicine in the thirteenth century, teaching was anchored in texts collectively referred to as the Ars medicine and, in Italy, as the Articella or "the little art." Both titles reflect the centrality of Galen's compendium on the medical art, Techne, which circulated in the Middle Ages under various names, including Microtegni and Ars parva. This primer inspired the initial grouping of five to six basic works, ranging from the Hippocratic Aphorisms to a Byzantine tract on uroscopy, into the nucleus of a curriculum. Galen further set the tone for the core's expansion and the addition of a tier of commentaries (Ars commentata). The elaboration and dominance of the collection is most fully documented for the University of Paris, where the intellectual climate was eminently favorable for a medical education based on the exposition of sources. Paris schools long manifested the greatest reverence for textual tradition, preference for dialectic over experience, and insistence that the literate arts bring freedom from manual drudgery.

The Paris masters have a kindred spirit and a champion in Cornelius O'Boyle, up to a point. He shares their preoccupation with having complete, accurate, and orderly access to the authoritative sources. He reviewed nearly two hundred manuscripts, concentrating on twenty-six of these that dated from the 1270s to the 1420s. The result is a painstaking inventory of the original components of the Ars medicine, the variations and additions, and the layers of commentaries, together with a chronology of the collection's development. O'Boyle's strength lies in codicology and paleography: he describes in detail the physical composition and production of codices, focuses on editorial techniques such as interlinear glosses, and waxes enthusiastic about diacritical marks. He shows little interest in contents and concepts, logical structure and progress within the textbooks, the division of learning matter into theoretical and practical subjects, or the thrust of the commentaries. Even if most scholastic exegesis was dialectical or semantic, certain debates could have placed the teaching of the Ars medicine in a more concrete framework; this is especially the case for questiones, triggered by the first Hippocratic Aphorism: whether medicine is an art or a science, whether it can prolong life, whether personal experience can be trusted, and so on. By overstating the importance and uniformity of didactic formats, O'Boyle unwittingly perpetuates the stereotype of Parisian pedantry.

The author might have given his subject more thought. He would definitely have benefited from closer editorial assistance and greater familiarity with historiography. There are numerous small errors and, more alarming, dubious translations of crucial phrases. For example, it is too facile to transform an early mention of study "de phisicis" into a reference to "teachers of medicine" (pp. 17-18). It seems questionable whether "examen generale" or "examen in communibus" can be interpreted as held "in the presence of all the masters" rather than covering general subject matter, and "examen particulare" as "in private rooms" rather than on specific subjects; it is unlikely that any examen was "sometimes called admissus [sic] in cameram" (pp. 21-22). In the texts quoted, "experimentum" clearly means either prescription or observation, and not "procedure" nor, most certainly, "experimenting" (pp. 211-12)! The latter interpretation, ironic in light of the medieval perception of Paris as indifferent to empirical knowledge, exemplifies the limitations in O'Boyle's depth of analysis and sense of context. These limitations are compounded by his apparent unawareness of key studies, most notably by Owsei Temkin on Galenism and Walton Schalick on Jean de Saint-Amand, and of relevant works by Paul Diepgen, Loren MacKinney, Brian Lawn, and...