Michael R. McVaugh – författare

This book describes the medical world of the early fourteenth century through a study of the extensive archival material and contemporary writings which exist for eastern Spain in the decades before the Black Death. It describes the range of medical practice which then existed - a continuum ranging from scattered academic physicians to barbers and empirics - and gives evidence for the levels and numerical growth of these various occupations in early fourteenth-century communities (although it also emphasizes that occupational distinctions were not yet sharply drawn). The newly translated Greco-Arabic medical learning was beginning to spread through this continuum of practice, and the book argues that public enthusiasm for the new learned medicine led to the 'medicalization' of certain social and legal institutions, thus preparing a role for a medical profession in this society before its physicians had shown any consciousness of collective self-interest and identity.

Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), one of the most celebrated rabbis in the history of Judaism, was a prolific author of influential Arabic philosophical and medical treatises as well as two of the most important works on Jewish law. A companion to the English translation and Arabic text presented in the first volume of "On Asthma", this volume offers Gerrit Bos' critical editions of all three surviving medieval Hebrew translations of Maimonides' work: one allegedly prepared by the fourteenth-century physician Samuel Benveniste, who served Don Manuel, brother of King Pedro IV of Aragon; a second by Joshua Shatibi from Jativa between the years 1379 and 1390, for the referendary Fernan Diaz of Toledo at the court of King Juan II of Castile; and a third by an anonymous translator, possibly in the thirteenth century.The volume also contains critical editions by Michael R. McVaugh of the two medieval Latin translations of Maimonides' treatise, one probably made by Giovanni da Capua at Rome circa 1300 and the other begun by Armengaud Blaise in Montpellier in 1294 but completed eight years later. It concludes with a section of addenda and corrigenda to the first volume.