Medicine in the Medieval Mediterranean – serie

Manuscripts containing Greek medical texts were inventoried by author and work at the beginning of the 20th century by a group of philologists under the direction of Hermann Diels. Useful as it was - and will continue to be – Diels’ catalogue omitted authors and works, misidentified manuscripts, and overlooked codices. Furthermore, since the publication of the catalogue, some libraries have adopted a new system of classification, manuscripts have been destroyed, items have changed location, and new ones have come to light. The present Census is a checklist of the Greek medical manuscripts currently known in collections worldwide. It is both an amended and updated index of Diels’ catalogue, and a list of the items missed or overlooked in Diels, or located since. Although it does not supersede Diels’ catalogue, it is the indispensable instrument for a New Diels, and will be the reference for years to come for any new critical edition and medico-historical research based on manuscripts, besides providing the basis for a broad range of other historical inquiries, from codicology to the history of medicine and science, including Byzantine intellectual history, Renaissance studies and humanism, history of the book and early printing, and the history of medical philology and learning.

Scholars have made conflicting claims for Byzantine hospitals as medical institutions and as the forebears of the modern hospital. In this study is the first systematic examination of the evidence of the xenôn texts, or Xenonika, on which all such claims must in part rest. These texts, compiled broadly between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, are also transcribed or edited, with the exception of the combined texts of Romanos and Theophilos that, the study proposes, were originally a single manual and teaching work for doctors, probably based on xenôn practice. A schema of their combined chapter headings sets out the unified structure of this text. A short handlist briefly describes the principal manuscripts referred to throughout the study. The introduction briefly examines our evidence for the xenônes from the early centuries of the East Roman Empire to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Chapter 3 examines the texts in xenon medical practice and compares them to some other medical manuals and remedy texts of the Late period and to their structures. The xenôn-ascribed texts are discussed one by one in chapters 4–8; the concluding chapter 9 draw together the common, as well as the divergent, aspects of each text and looks to the comparative evidence for hospital medical practice of the time in the West.

This book is the first study to consider the extraordinary manuscript now known as the Carrara Herbal (British Library, Egerton 2020) within the complex network of medical, artistic and intellectual traditions from which it emerged. The manuscript contains an illustrated, vernacular copy of the thirteenth-century pharmacopeia by Ibn Sarābī, an Arabic-speaking Christian physician working in al-Andalus known in the West as Serapion the Younger. By 1290, Serapion’s treatise was available in Latin translation and circulated widely in medical schools across the Italian peninsula. Commissioned in the late fourteenth century by the prince of Padua, Francesco II ‘il Novello’ da Carrara (r. 1390–1405), the Carrara Herbal attests to the growing presence of Arabic medicine both inside and outside of the University. Its contents speak to the Carrara family’s historic role as patrons and protectors of the Studium, yet its form – a luxury book in Paduan dialect adorned with family heraldry and stylistically diverse representations of plants – locates it in court culture. In particular, the manuscript’s form connects Serapion’s treatise to patterns of book collection and rhetorics of self-making encouraged by humanists and practiced by Francesco’s ancestors. Beginning with Petrarch (1304–74) and continuing with Pier Paolo Vergerio (ca. 1369–1444), humanists held privileged positions in the Carrara court, and humanist culture vied with the University’s successes for leading roles in Carrara self-promotion. With the other illustrated books in the prince’s collection, the Herbal negotiated these traditional arenas of family patronage and brought them into confluence, promoting Francesco as an ideal ‘physician prince’ capable of ensuring the moral and physical health of Padua. Considered in this way, the Carrara Herbal is the product of an intersection between the Pan-Mediterranean transmission of medical knowle

This book presents an edition of the Questiones super libro De Animalibus Aristotelis, a work by one of the greatest philosophers and physicians of the 13th century, Peter of Spain (later Pope John XXI, 1205-1277). He took as the basis for his work the translation from the Arabic made in Toledo around 1220 by Michael Scotus which included three important Aristotelian treatises. Preceding the critical edition, Dr Navarro offers an introduction to the person and works of Peter of Spain, the intellectual context of the 13th century characterized by Scholasticism and an Aristotelian Renaissance, and a short analysis of the linguistics and form of the Questiones. She also analyses the sources on which Peter drew, Greco-Latin, Arabo-Jewish and, of course, late antique and medieval treatises, showing that the text was not exclusively zoological in nature, but discusses important medical and philosophical topics, illustrating his extensive knowledge of both the Aristotelian corpus and 13th-century medicine. The text (divided into XIX books) is not a mere commentary about animals, but rather, as the title shows, a collection of questions in the Salernitan manner, the use of which was considered most appropriate for analysis and communication in the medieval scientific community to which Peter of Spain belonged. Alongside methodological and zoological problems, Peter of Spain discusses important questions disputed among the scholars of the period, including the location, hierarchy, motion, function and parts of the principal organs, the five senses, and many other medical issues such as reproduction, illnesses, or growth. Finally Dr Navarro includes a glossary that contains proper names (mainly those of the authorities and sources quoted by Petrus Hispanus), animal names (and their parts and substances), and the names of plants, metals, and the like.

This volume presents the first edition of the Arabic translation, by Hunayn ibn Ishaq, of Galen's Critical Days (De diebus decretoriis), together with the first translation of the text into a modern language. The substantial introduction contextualizes the treatise within the Greek and Arabic traditions. Galen's Critical Days was a founding text of astrological medicine. In febrile illnesses, the critical days are the days on which an especially severe pattern of symptoms, a crisis, was likely to occur. The crisis was thought to expel the disease-producing substances from the body. If its precise timing were known, the physician could prepare the patient so that the crisis would be most beneficial. After identifying the critical days based on empirical data and showing how to use them in therapy, Galen explains the critical days via the moon's influence. In the historical introduction Glen Cooper discusses the translation of the Critical Days in Arabic, and adumbrates its possible significance in the intellectual debates and political rivalries among the 9th-century Baghdad elite. It is argued that Galen originally composed the Critical Days both to confound the Skeptics of his own day and to refute a purely mathematical, rationalist approach to science. These features made the text useful in the rivalries between Baghdad scholars. Al-Kindi (d.c. 866) famously propounded a mathematical approach to science akin to the latter. The scholar-bureaucrat responsible for funding this translation, Muhammad ibn Musa (d. 873), al-Kindi's nemesis, may have found the treatise useful in refuting that approach. The commentary and notes to the facing page translation address issues of translation, as well as important concepts.

In 1930 the Cretan healer Nikolaos Konstantinos Theodorakis of Meronas re-copied a notebook containing medical lore passed down through his family over generations. The present volume offers an edition of this notebook together with an English translation, the first of its kind. It belongs to the genre of iatrosophia, practical handbooks dating mainly to the 17th to 19th centuries which compiled healing wisdom, along with snippets of agricultural, meteorological and veterinary advice, and admixtures of religion, astrology and magic. Both fascinating and of critical importance, iatrosophia allow glimpses of classical and Byzantine medical sources and illustrate the vitality and resilience of Greek traditional medical and botanical knowledge. From years spent exploring local healing customs in Crete's Amari region, Patricia Clark is able to present Theodorakis' iatrosophion against a rich historical, geographical and social background. Introductory essays and explanatory notes to the translation give context to the iatrosophion and provide the specialized information necessary for a good understanding of the text. The abundant materia medica of the notebook is treated in a substantial appendix. Each animal, mineral, plant or product is provided with an overview of its various names through the millennia. Such entries are not only a key to understanding the Greek medical legacy, but also a vivid illustration of its usage from antiquity to the present day.

Daily life and living conditions in the Byzantine world are relatively underexplored subjects, often neglected in comparison with more visible aspects of Byzantine culture, such as works of art. The book is among the few publications on Greek Byzantine populations and helps pioneer a new approach to the subject, opening a window on health status and dietary patterns through the lens of bioarchaeological research. Drawing on a diversity of disciplines (biology, chemistry, archaeology and history), the author focuses on the complex interaction between physiology, culture and the environment in Byzantine populations from Crete in the 7th to 12th centuries. The systematic analysis and interpretation of the mortality profiles, the observed pathological conditions, and of the chemical data, all set in the cultural context of the era, brings new evidence to bear on the reconstruction of living conditions in Byzantine Crete. Individual chapters look at the demographic profiles and mortality patterns of adult and non-adult populations, and study dietary habits and breastfeeding and weaning patterns. In addition, this book provides an indispensable body of primary data for future research in these fields, and so furthers an interdisciplinary approach in tracing the health of the past populations.

Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West brings together eleven papers by leading scholars in ancient and medieval medicine and pharmacy. Fittingly, the volume honors Professor John M. Riddle, one of today's most respected medieval historians, whose career has been devoted to decoding the complexities of early medicine and pharmacy. "Herbs" in the title generally connotes drugs in ancient and medieval times; the essays here discuss interesting aspects of the challenges scholars face as they translate and interpret texts in several older languages. Some of the healers in the volume are named, such as Philotas of Amphissa, Gariopontus, and Constantine the African; many are anonymous and known only from their treatises on drugs and/or medicine. The volume's scope demonstrates the breadth of current research being undertaken in the field, examining both practical medical arts and medical theory from the ancient world into early modern times. It also includes a paper about a cutting-edge Internet-based system for ongoing academic collaboration. The essays in this volume reveal insightful research approaches and highlight new discoveries that will be of interest to the international academic community of classicists, medievalists, and early-modernists because of the scarcity of publications objectively evaluating long-lived traditions that have their origin in the world of the ancient Mediterranean.

This volume presents the first edition of the Arabic translation, by Hunayn ibn Ishaq, of Galen's Critical Days (De diebus decretoriis), together with the first translation of the text into a modern language. The substantial introduction contextualizes the treatise within the Greek and Arabic traditions. Galen's Critical Days was a founding text of astrological medicine. In febrile illnesses, the critical days are the days on which an especially severe pattern of symptoms, a crisis, was likely to occur. The crisis was thought to expel the disease-producing substances from the body. If its precise timing were known, the physician could prepare the patient so that the crisis would be most beneficial. After identifying the critical days based on empirical data and showing how to use them in therapy, Galen explains the critical days via the moon's influence. In the historical introduction Glen Cooper discusses the translation of the Critical Days in Arabic, and adumbrates its possible significance in the intellectual debates and political rivalries among the 9th-century Baghdad elite. It is argued that Galen originally composed the Critical Days both to confound the Skeptics of his own day and to refute a purely mathematical, rationalist approach to science. These features made the text useful in the rivalries between Baghdad scholars. Al-Kindi (d.c. 866) famously propounded a mathematical approach to science akin to the latter. The scholar-bureaucrat responsible for funding this translation, Muhammad ibn Musa (d. 873), al-Kindi's nemesis, may have found the treatise useful in refuting that approach. The commentary and notes to the facing page translation address issues of translation, as well as important concepts.

Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West brings together eleven papers by leading scholars in ancient and medieval medicine and pharmacy. Fittingly, the volume honors Professor John M. Riddle, one of today's most respected medieval historians, whose career has been devoted to decoding the complexities of early medicine and pharmacy. "Herbs" in the title generally connotes drugs in ancient and medieval times; the essays here discuss interesting aspects of the challenges scholars face as they translate and interpret texts in several older languages. Some of the healers in the volume are named, such as Philotas of Amphissa, Gariopontus, and Constantine the African; many are anonymous and known only from their treatises on drugs and/or medicine. The volume's scope demonstrates the breadth of current research being undertaken in the field, examining both practical medical arts and medical theory from the ancient world into early modern times. It also includes a paper about a cutting-edge Internet-based system for ongoing academic collaboration. The essays in this volume reveal insightful research approaches and highlight new discoveries that will be of interest to the international academic community of classicists, medievalists, and early-modernists because of the scarcity of publications objectively evaluating long-lived traditions that have their origin in the world of the ancient Mediterranean.

Manuscripts containing Greek medical texts were inventoried by author and work at the beginning of the 20th century by a group of philologists under the direction of Hermann Diels. Useful as it was - and will continue to be – Diels’ catalogue omitted authors and works, misidentified manuscripts, and overlooked codices. Furthermore, since the publication of the catalogue, some libraries have adopted a new system of classification, manuscripts have been destroyed, items have changed location, and new ones have come to light. The present Census is a checklist of the Greek medical manuscripts currently known in collections worldwide. It is both an amended and updated index of Diels’ catalogue, and a list of the items missed or overlooked in Diels, or located since. Although it does not supersede Diels’ catalogue, it is the indispensable instrument for a New Diels, and will be the reference for years to come for any new critical edition and medico-historical research based on manuscripts, besides providing the basis for a broad range of other historical inquiries, from codicology to the history of medicine and science, including Byzantine intellectual history, Renaissance studies and humanism, history of the book and early printing, and the history of medical philology and learning.

Scholars have made conflicting claims for Byzantine hospitals as medical institutions and as the forebears of the modern hospital. In this study is the first systematic examination of the evidence of the xenôn texts, or Xenonika, on which all such claims must in part rest. These texts, compiled broadly between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, are also transcribed or edited, with the exception of the combined texts of Romanos and Theophilos that, the study proposes, were originally a single manual and teaching work for doctors, probably based on xenôn practice. A schema of their combined chapter headings sets out the unified structure of this text. A short handlist briefly describes the principal manuscripts referred to throughout the study. The introduction briefly examines our evidence for the xenônes from the early centuries of the East Roman Empire to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Chapter 3 examines the texts in xenon medical practice and compares them to some other medical manuals and remedy texts of the Late period and to their structures. The xenôn-ascribed texts are discussed one by one in chapters 4–8; the concluding chapter 9 draw together the common, as well as the divergent, aspects of each text and looks to the comparative evidence for hospital medical practice of the time in the West.

This book presents an edition of the Questiones super libro De Animalibus Aristotelis, a work by one of the greatest philosophers and physicians of the 13th century, Peter of Spain (later Pope John XXI, 1205-1277). He took as the basis for his work the translation from the Arabic made in Toledo around 1220 by Michael Scotus which included three important Aristotelian treatises. Preceding the critical edition, Dr Navarro offers an introduction to the person and works of Peter of Spain, the intellectual context of the 13th century characterized by Scholasticism and an Aristotelian Renaissance, and a short analysis of the linguistics and form of the Questiones. She also analyses the sources on which Peter drew, Greco-Latin, Arabo-Jewish and, of course, late antique and medieval treatises, showing that the text was not exclusively zoological in nature, but discusses important medical and philosophical topics, illustrating his extensive knowledge of both the Aristotelian corpus and 13th-century medicine. The text (divided into XIX books) is not a mere commentary about animals, but rather, as the title shows, a collection of questions in the Salernitan manner, the use of which was considered most appropriate for analysis and communication in the medieval scientific community to which Peter of Spain belonged. Alongside methodological and zoological problems, Peter of Spain discusses important questions disputed among the scholars of the period, including the location, hierarchy, motion, function and parts of the principal organs, the five senses, and many other medical issues such as reproduction, illnesses, or growth. Finally Dr Navarro includes a glossary that contains proper names (mainly those of the authorities and sources quoted by Petrus Hispanus), animal names (and their parts and substances), and the names of plants, metals, and the like.

This book is the first study to consider the extraordinary manuscript now known as the Carrara Herbal (British Library, Egerton 2020) within the complex network of medical, artistic and intellectual traditions from which it emerged. The manuscript contains an illustrated, vernacular copy of the thirteenth-century pharmacopeia by Ibn Sarābī, an Arabic-speaking Christian physician working in al-Andalus known in the West as Serapion the Younger. By 1290, Serapion’s treatise was available in Latin translation and circulated widely in medical schools across the Italian peninsula.Commissioned in the late fourteenth century by the prince of Padua, Francesco II ‘il Novello’ da Carrara (r. 1390–1405), the Carrara Herbal attests to the growing presence of Arabic medicine both inside and outside of the University. Its contents speak to the Carrara family’s historic role as patrons and protectors of the Studium, yet its form – a luxury book in Paduan dialect adorned with family heraldry and stylistically diverse representations of plants – locates it in court culture. In particular, the manuscript’s form connects Serapion’s treatise to patterns of book collection and rhetorics of self-making encouraged by humanists and practiced by Francesco’s ancestors.Beginning with Petrarch (1304–74) and continuing with Pier Paolo Vergerio (ca. 1369–1444), humanists held privileged positions in the Carrara court, and humanist culture vied with the University’s successes for leading roles in Carrara self-promotion. With the other illustrated books in the prince’s collection, the Herbal negotiated these traditional arenas of family patronage and brought them into confluence, promoting Francesco as an ideal ‘physician prince’ capable of ensuring the moral and physical health of Padua. Considered in this way, the Carrara Herbal is the product of an intersection between the Pan-Mediterranean transmission of medical knowledge and the rise of humanism in the Italian courts, an intersection typically attributed to the later Renaissance.

The lack of reliable demographic data for Byzantine cities raises questions as to the actual rate of expansion and mortality of plague. This essentially leads to the question of change and progress of the nature of infectious diseases in that period. Also, the analysis of the written sources raised a series of questions, mainly epidemiological in nature: the entry points and spreading of the disease in the Mediterranean, the epidemic dynamics as well as the evolution of the microbial agent of plague, i.e. Yersinia pestis. The present study offers a substantial explanation for the outbreaks of plague that struck Byzantium by exploring the multiple factors that caused or triggered epidemics. The study covers the entire period extending from the beginning of the Byzantine Empire until its fall in 1453, which was marked by two major pandemics, namely the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death. All known primary sources were collected and grouped from a spatiotemporal perspective, so as to retrace the unfolding of the two pandemics. The focus of the research shifts from known historical frameworks to ones of human activities, endemic foci and natural environment of the era as risk factors of the outbreaks.

This book considers the introduction of materialist and physiological reasoning into late medieval discourse on the soul in the work of Peter of Abano (d.1316); in this, it adds a vital component to our understanding of this important period in the history of medicine and of the philosophy of human nature. Peter was an influential physician and philosopher whose activities spanned from Paris to Padua to Constantinople, where he played a vital role in the appropriation of Greek and Arabic medical and natural philosophical sources in the Latin West. In his engagement with these sources, he sought a “reconciliation” (as his most famous work, the Conciliator, was titled) of medicine and philosophy. Through this reconciliation, Peter develops a rich description of the integration of physical and spiritual operations, and of physiological and mental capacities, leading him to discussions of imagination, moral virtues, and intellectual powers. Because Peter developed many of his ideas within a traditional medical framework, he created a distinctively “medical” anthropology. His unique understanding of human nature would remain influential for centuries to come.

The arterial pulse was a major aspect of all three major medical traditions - Western, Chinese and Indian. Galen's extant works are the only significant account of Western views surviving from ancient times. Not only does he set out his own views in great detail but he also gives a large amount of information on the views of others whose writings are lost. In the translated treatises in the present work, Galen deals with basic anatomy and physiology, classification of the types of pulses, diagnosis of and from the pulses, causal factors of clinical relevance and the very important matter of the prognostic value of the pulses. This is the first translation into a modern Western language of Galen's very substantial body of work on this subject.

In De tremore, rigore, palpitatione, et convulsione liber, a forgotten work preserved in ten Greek manuscripts and in some medieval translations into Latin, Galen described four types of abnormal involuntary movements: tremor, rigor, palpitation, and spasm. De tremore provides the first detailed description of these movement disorders in the western medical tradition and it became one of the most quoted and influential texts in the history of neurology and neuropathology (e.g., Parkinson and MS). Galen’s questions about the nature of these neurological conditions are still relevant today and some of them have not been resolved yet. Furthermore, De tremore represents an authoritative source for understanding some key concepts of ancient neurophysiology and the legacy of humoral theory in the history of western medicine (e.g., motor impulse, innate heat, psychic pneuma, voluntary motions, etc.). This volume offers a new complete critical edition of the Galenic text, with an introduction, English translation, commentary, reception history and indices.

The current interest in medieval medicinal plants is hampered by the lack of easily accessible texts and the uncertainty in the identification of the plants. This book aims to compensate for these shortcomings. If seeking beyond Culpeper’s Herbal (1653), authors frequently use Renaissance authors, whereas they regarded plants in different ways: medieval writers regarded plants as a homogenous material and those from the Renaissance onward attributed them specific habitats, properties and requirements. Plants were involved in all aspects of medieval life many of which seem alien to us, but nevertheless provide an insight to the medieval beliefs and living conditions. Three 11th–15th century texts reflecting the many components of the medieval plant world have been chosen as sources here: Macer Floridus, Tractatus de Herbis, and Agnus Castus. On each plant in these sources, this book provides a monograph based on extensive quotations and a thorough discussion of sources taking into consideration the classical literature and the practical experience gained by 50 years growing these plants trying to replicate their propagation and cultivation methods, however strange they might seem to present-day scholars and scientists.