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This unique examination of medieval medicine as detailed in physician's manuals of the period reveals a more sophisticated approach to the medical arts than expected for the time. Far from the primitive and barbaric practices the Middle Ages may conjure up in our minds, doctors during that time combined knowledge, tradition, innovation, and intuition to create a humane, holistic approach to understanding and treating every known disease. In fact, a singularly authoritative medical source of the period, Lily of Medicine, continued to provide crucial study for students and practitioners of medicine almost four centuries after its completion in 1305. This unprecedented book investigates the ext...
While premodern poets and preachers viewed leprosy as a “disease of the soul,” physicians in the period understood it to be a “cancer of the whole body.” In this innovative study, medical historian Luke Demaitre explores medical and social perspectives on leprosy at a time when judicious diagnosis could spare healthy people from social ostracization and help the afflicted get a license to beg. Extending his inquiry from the first century to late in the eighteenth century, Demaitre draws on translations of academic treatises and archival records to illuminate the professional standing, knowledge, and conduct of the practitioners who struggled to move popular perceptions of leprosy beyond loathing and pity. He finds that, while not immune to social and cultural perceptions of the leprous as degenerate, and while influenced by their own fears of contagion, premodern physicians moderated society's reactions to leprosy and were dedicated to the well-being of their patients.
First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.
This book examines the social, institutional and cultural setting of medical practices in the medieval town of Montpellier which boasted one of the first universities of the middle ages and a famous school of medicine. Some of its most celebrated masters and their medical works have been thoroughly studied but few of them try to put these in context with a thriving urban community of merchants and craftsmen that were at the core of the city council. Their concurrent efforts will endow Montpellier of a rich health care system featuring not only the university masters but also the city’s barber-surgeons and apothecaries. Their collective fate is revealed here in an integrated picture of health and society in the middle ages.
First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
This is a seminal study of cultural attitudes to old age among Jews of the medieval Mediterranean and Near Eastern regions. Rigorously researched and accessibly written, it will appeal to scholars across a range of disciplines as well as to the broader public. While the focus is on Jewish society and culture, critical context regarding the social history of ageing is provided by comparative perspectives from the Muslim world as well as from Spain and Provence and other areas of Christian Europe that were in the Arabic Andalusian cultural orbit. The study draws on many literary genres and scholarly disciplines: philosophy and theology, ethics and law, biblical commentary, Hebrew poetry, medical literature, and a host of marriage contracts, personal letters, and family and communal records from the Cairo Genizah. The result is a nuanced portrait of ageing as both a lived reality and a cultural paradigm in medieval Jewish society.
Medievalism and medieval medicine are vibrant subfields of medieval studies, enjoying sustained scholarly attention and popularity among undergraduates. Popular perceptions of medieval medicine, however, remain understudied. This book aims to fill that lacuna by providing a multifaceted study of medical medievalism, defined as modern representations of medieval medicine intended for popular audiences. The volume takes as its starting point the fictional medieval detective Brother Cadfael, whose observations on bodies, herbs, and death have shaped many popular conceptions of medieval medicine in the Anglophone world. The ten contributing authors move beyond Cadfael by exploring global medical...
This book deals with the work of one of the most famous medical scholars of the middle ages, renowned to his contemporaries as being able to see more deeply into the theory of medicine than anyone else. It is based in particular on an analysis of his huge commentary on Avicenna's Canon, the biggest and most important single medical text of the Middle Ages. This is the first modern analysis of the commentary, and while the size and elaborate scholastic structure of it has deterred historians, it remained an important text for two centuries. This book explains the nature and purposes of medical scholasticism, which reached its height in the half century before the Black Death, in which Gentile died.
We live in a world riven through with standards. To understand more of their deep, rich past is to understand ourselves better. The two volumes, Standardization in the Middle Ages. Volume 1: The North and Standardization in the Middle Ages. Volume 2: Europe, turn to the Middle Ages to give a deeper understanding of the medieval ideas and practices that produced--and were produced by--standards and standardization. At first glance, the Middle Ages might appear an unlikely place to look for standardization. The editors argue that, on the contrary, generating predictability is a precondition for meaningful cultural interaction in any historical period and that we may look to the Middle Ages to ...