Medicine in the English Middle Ages by Faye Getz (1998)

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.One dis-tinction, albeit a sometimes fuzzy one, does emerge from a survey of thewritten records of medieval English medicine.In general, texts can be di-vided into those that derive ultimately from ancient Greek sources, trans-lated and adapted by Islamic scholars into Arabic and then into scholasticLatin for use in universities; and Roman or humanistic, those derived fromthe writings of educated patriarchs like Pliny or the Elder Cato, which re-lied on simple remedies, charms, and traditional wisdom.The latter aris-tocratic and familial medicine often found in encyclopedic form with othertypes of useful knowledge met the relatively simple needs of monasticcommunities.Aristocratic, encyclopedic medicine enjoyed an unbrokentradition in England from the time of the Anglo-Saxons, lasted beyond theend of the medieval period, and seemed to some educated medical writersto be the medicine not only of the ancient Roman paterfamilias but of theOld Testament patriarchs themselves.These two styles of medical writing,the Greek/Arabic and the Roman/Anglo-Saxon or patriarchal, were neverentirely separate (Pliny, for instance, used Greek sources at times).But theydo form distinctive trends in medieval English medical writing, not juststages in evolution toward modern medicine.As such, they serve as usefulclassifications for understanding the nature of elite medical discourse.THE ORIGINS OF GRECO-ARABICMEDICAL TEXTS IN LATINThe first large body of written medicine in the West comes from the ancientGreek city-states and is associated with the name Hippocrates.The Hippo-cratic corpus of texts, most of which were written between 430 and 330B.C., helped establish medicine as a discipline that had a history, madeprogress, and rested on a set of theoretical principles based on, but notlimited to, experience.5 Ultimately what distinguished Hippocratic medi-cine from others was its insistence that every natural phenomenon (andthus all diseases) had rational causes.6 These rational causes were the sub-ject for public debate.7 The reasons for these causes were also subject toTHE MEDI CAL TEXT 37refinement, because the physicians of the past knew less than the physi-cians of the present, and those of the present less than those of the future.8Hippocratic medicine was written down, as was the philosophy of theancient Greeks.This very fact gave Hippocratic medicine an enormousadvantage over competing types of healing that did not leave much writtenrecord, for instance, healing by resorting to the help of the gods.9 Indeed,it was obvious from their writings that Hippocratic physicians consideredvarious kinds of religious and mystical practitioners to be their competi-tors.This is not to say that Hippocratic physicians were irreligious.On thecontrary, they were at pains to demonstrate their own piety and the impietyof their competitors.10 What in the end distinguished Hippocratic physi-cians from their rivals was that their writings survived, like those of Plato,Aristotle, and their commentators.11The most distinguished reader of the Hippocratic corpus of texts wasanother Greek, the physician Galen, who served as philosopher to the StoicRoman emperor Marcus Aurelius.Galen extolled Hippocrates as a greatphysician, almost a god, but having conceded that, was anxious to demon-strate how he himself knew more.12 Galen was probably the most prolificwriter of antiquity, covering the whole of rational medicine, from surgeryto anatomy to pharmacy.He, like the Hippocratic physicians, demon-strated his medical knowledge publicly, and argued at length that he wasnot only Hippocrates successor but Aristotle s as well.13Galen insisted, against those who would relegate the physician to a lowlystatus with other craftsmen, that the best doctor was also a philosopherand, more than that, a philanthropist, who dispensed his medical knowl-edge to his familiars for the love of humanity alone and without regard forpayment.Assumed in Galen s sort of medicine was a Stoic detachmentfrom the hurly-burly of the marketplace.Galen s physician was a wealthygentleman of great learning, freed by his wealth from the exigencies ofmaking a living or rearing a family.14Galen wrote in Greek, which even under the Roman Empire remainedthe language of philosophical learning.After the disintegration and divi-sion of the empire, the ability to read Greek was almost lost in the West,even though the Eastern Empire, Byzantium, carried on that tradition.Butpolitical and religious differences acted to isolate the Eastern and WesternEmpires.The copying of Greek medical texts continued under Byzantium,but the Western Empire for the most part was unable to appreciate thiswork in its original language.15The military and religious triumphs of the prophet Muhammad trans-formed the culture of much of the Mediterranean world.Islamic rulersfunded vast educational enterprises, including schools of translation,where the philosophical and medical texts of the Greeks were examined,translated, and adapted to Islamic culture.Islamic scholars made compila-38 CHAPTER II Itions of Greek philosophical medicine, with commentaries they preparedthemselves, written in Arabic.16 The most famous of these compendiumswas the Canon of the Persian philosopher Ibn Sina (Avicenna), a huge textso learned and well organized that it dominated scholarly medicine wellinto the Renaissance.17Western scholars, usually from the Iberian Peninsula or Italy, began tocollect and translate Arabic medical texts in the twelfth century as part ofa general enterprise in Western Christendom to recover and examine thephilosophical learning of the ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle.18 Amongthe first centers of philosophic medical learning in the West was Salerno,in southern Italy, near the famous Benedictine monastery of Monte Cas-sino.At the end of the eleventh century, Constantine the African assem-bled a school of translators who helped bring philosophical medicine backinto the Latin-speaking world.These writings in Latin formed the basis ofthe curriculum of the so-called School of Salerno, the first medical univer-sity in the West.19What Constantine and those like him brought to the West was not a merereconstruction of Greek learning; rather, it was the product of Islamic un-derstanding of the ancient Greeks.Islamic philosophers systematizedGreek medical learning to make it easier to teach (most obviously bytranslating this learning into Arabic).They also added their own observa-tions about astrology and alchemy, advancing Western knowledge of theseand other subjects far beyond what it had been in Galen s time.20 Westernmedicine from the twelfth century onward, then, was part of a more wide-spread interest in the culture of Islam: its philosophy, its art, its poetry, andits technical knowledge.Western armies may have repulsed the armies ofIslam, but Western scholars later eagerly embraced the impressive learningof the very people they had fought so hard to defeat.ARABIC MEDICAL LEARNING IN ENGLANDFrom the end of the eleventh century, Western scholars and travelers wereable to take increasing interest in the culture of Islam [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Linki