Medicine, Society and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (review)

Abstract

Reviews 109 An article on Pirandello's complex relationship with Germany by M . C. Mauceri (pp. 180-192), and a study in Italian on Italy's great contemporary dialect poet by Silvio Trambaiolo close the literary section of the volume. Trambaiolo writes on Zanzotto's dialect poems Mistierbi (1984) with the insight derived from seeing the punctuation and lexical variants in a manuscript version of 1979, which was shown to him by a w o m a n w h o had received a dedicated copy of these verses. Space does not here permit a detailed exposition of the three essays on language that close the volume. Antonia Rubino's article concerning three generations of Sicilian Australians living in contact in the immigrant situation, points out once again h o w language shift is rapid even within a household of nominal Italians. Months of tape recordings show that immigrant Sicilian speakers tend to defer to the subject matter choices of their children or parents, and hence to a preferred linguistic vehicle (pp. 209-237), which is always the language of the receiving country. P. Marmini and N. Zanardi close this volume in honour of a former head of Italian by illustrating just h o w far Second Language Acquisition research has progressed since the Italian language teaching, for example, of Professor Frederick May's generation (pp. 238-248). Nicoletta Zanardi, also of the Sydney department, explains h o w their locally produced Quintetto Italiano, using thematic passages from the Italian media, meets new classroom needs and responds to course assessment requests by the concerned client, the student learner, whether of non-Italian background or not. In sum, this volume is a sophisticated tribute to a Pirandellian scholar, a collector of Futurist whimsies (as shown by his 'Dialogic Hilarity and Body-Madness' at pp. 9-37) and the most challenging setter of undergraduate exam papers that can have been produced in our field. Bruce Merry University of Kuwait Amundsen, Darrel W., Medicine, Society and Faith in the Ancient and Medie Worlds, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1996; cloth; pp. xvi, 391; R.R.P. US$39.95. In Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, Darre Amundsen draws together eleven essays, nine of them previously published from 1977 through to 1995, and a further two, 'Body, Soul, and Physician' and 'The Moral Stance of the Earliest Syphilographers, 1495-1505', written especially for this volume. In general terms, he investigates the history of medical ethics, focusing on the 'tensions and compatibilities' between medicine and religion. The introductory chapter, 'Body, Soul, and Physician', argues that religion and medicine share the goal of providing for man's (sic) well-being. The 110 Reviews relationship between the two may take four forms: medicine is subsumed under religion, for example, in medieval Europe; religion and medicine are partially separated, as in classical Greece; medicine and religion are completely separate, the current dominant legal position of the West; and religion is subsumed under medicine, an approach Amundsen suggests is rapidly gaining ground in the modern USA. The negotiation of these boundaries, and the associated issue of respect for human life, form the balance of the chapter. In an analysis which moves from the tenets of the church fathers to the form of the medieval 'death chamber', Amundsen outlines the difficulties of physicians obligated to do everything possible to cure a patient, and also inevitably present at death, however useless their presence. Chapters Two to Six focus on the classical and early Christian worlds. Readers familiar with the current popular discourse around the 'Hippocratic Oath' will be surprised to discover that some of its tenets are not typical either of the Hippocratic Corpus or of the realities of classical medical practice. In fact, ethics such as 'the duty to prolong' life probably originated in the later middle ages. Amundsen discusses the unlicensed nature of ancient medical practitioners and the lack of universal adherence to a specified code of ethics, and cautions that it is 'probably irresponsible' to speak of any universal ancient attitudes. For example, some authors, such as Plato and Aristotle, saw the case of defective newborn children in terms of the...