Le corps a l'epreuve: Poisons, remedes et chirurgie: Aspects des pratiques medicales dans l'Antiquite et au Moyen-Age (review)

This volume brings together ten papers presented at two conferences held in Champagne in 1999, both of which considered the body as "put to the test" by a variety of classical (including Byzantine) and medieval medical or surgical interventions. It is never easy to review a collection of papers from a conference (let alone two) if they cohere poorly, but the second in particular of these two must have been a model of coherence. Seven of its papers—all concerned with the cultural implications of poison, and the curious connection understood to exist between poisons and remedies—form the heart of this collection. Under most circumstances we today tend to imagine poisons and remedies as opposites, one harming and the other healing, but these studies explore the ambiguity between the two that early medieval writers perceived.

Évelyne Samama introduces the theme by reminding the reader that pharmaka denoted both poison and medicine in Greek, and that the same equivocality is present in other languages as well. To select (inevitably somewhat invidiously) only a few of the other core papers for comment: Véronique Boudon analyzes Galen's concern to temper precisely the power of snake's flesh, the active homeopathic ingredient in the famous antidote theriac, so as to change it from lethal to healthful: too strong, and the patient would be poisoned; too weak, and he would not be helped. Laurence Moulinier shows that the (very idiosyncratic) worldview of Hildegard of Bingen in the mid-twelfth century understood poisonous substances to have been introduced into the order of nature as a result of Adam's fall, yet she accepted that poisonous plants like hemlock and mandragora could have therapeutic powers as well. And Franck Collard's account of learned medical writers of the late thirteenth century makes it plain that their vision of the world, though more naturalistic than Hildegard's, included poisons and medicines as acting on the human body in identical ways, by complexional properties or by specific form, and admitted that, depending on how they were prepared, poisons could have therapeutic effects and medicines could kill. As a group, these papers give support to the view that the history of pharmacy owes much to the history of toxicology.

The three remaining papers in this volume, originating in the other conference, have less thematic unity: a discussion of the relation between theory and practice in the Surgeries of Henri de Mondeville and Guy de Chauliac; an attempt to reconstruct the standards by which medieval observers determined the fact of death (based primarily on literary sources); and a study of the medico-legal procedures employed in the later Middle Ages to determine whether a suspicious death was due to poison. But the last in particular—a second paper by Franck Collard, grounded in a remarkable command of case literature and forensic detail—rounds the volume off by supplying a practical dimension to the theoretical considerations of "poison" explored at the outset. These are interesting and sometimes substantial contributions to our understanding of a variety of early medical practices, and to the intellectual framework that sustained them.