Latin Medical Texts Research Articles

Permittito aperiat oculum: typological considerations on P-lability and its interaction with morphosyntactic alignment in Latin medical texts

Abstract This paper explores the diachrony of Latin P-labile verbs (verbs that can be used transitively and intransitively with the preservation of the Patient and without a formal change), availing itself from evidence in medical and veterinary texts from the first to seventh century AD. The first part of the analysis discusses the influence of verbal semantics on the domain of lability in these texts and how lability developed as a diathetic strategy for the anticausative, the causative and the passive in Latin. Special attention is paid to the increase of P-lability as an anticausative strategy and its relation to the mediopassive and reflexive anticausative strategies in Late Latin. The second part of the analysis proposes a new explanation for the increase of P-lability in Latin and discusses the consequences of the development of a semantic-based alignment in Late Latin (the extended accusative) on the syntax and development of P-labile verbs.

Medicine in Gaelic Ireland and Scotland, c.1350–c.1750

AbstractBetween c.1350 and c.1750 a small group of professional hereditary physicians served the Gaelic communities of Ireland and Scotland. Over fifty medical kindreds provided advice regarding health maintenance and treatment with herbs and surgery. Their medical knowledge was derived from Gaelic translations of medieval European Latin medical texts grounded in the classical works of Hippocrates and Galen, and the Arab world. Students studied in medical schools where they copied and compiled medical texts in Irish, some for use as handbooks. Over 100 texts are extant. Political upheaval and scientific advances led to the eclipse of this medical world. Through examination of the Gaelic medical manuscripts and other sources this article provides an assessment of medicine in Gaelic Ireland and Scotland from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries.

Men and Infertility in Late Medieval English Medicine

The history of male reproductive disorders in the Middle Ages has been comparatively neglected compared to the history of women’s medicine. This article explores the ways the subject was discussed in a sample of widely circulated medieval Latin medical texts and examines how this information was adapted in English translations and recipe collections aimed at a wider audience which included medical practitioners. It argues that the possibility of male infertility was often recognised in learned medicine and that the forms of male infertility discussed went beyond sexual dysfunction and were presented as more closely equivalent to female infertility. However, male reproductive disorders were not so prominent in less academic texts aimed at medical practitioners. These works did acknowledge the possibility of male infertility and their readers may have employed remedies for this in practice, but a greater emphasis was placed on women, a situation which may reflect wider social attitudes.

IndexCat: A Resource for Earlier Medical and Scientific Works

A free database developed and maintained by the National Library of Medicine of the United States, IndexCat began as the digitized version of the print indices Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office, which was published from 1880 to 1961. The Index-Catalogue shows the holdings of the library of the Surgeon General of the United States Army, the precursor of National Library of Medicine. Recent additions to this database are eTK (Electronic Throndike and Kibre for Medieval Latin Medical Texts) and eVK2 (Electronic Voigts and Kurtz for Medieval English Medical Texts). IndexCat can provide information about the history of medicine and help in tracing the path of knowledge of a specific medical condition.

Anxious Love and Disordered Urine:

Abstract This article presents an edition of the chapter on intense emotional states including lovesickness in Henry Daniel's Middle English treatise on the judgment of urines, the Liber uricrisiarum. The chapter reveals an idiosyncratic perspective on a medical counterpart to the malady of love that figures prominently in medieval literature and culture. Although the condition of amor hereos was frequently discussed in medieval Latin medical texts, it failed to generate interest in the equivalent vernacular English discourse. Among widely circulated English texts, only Chaucer's description of Arcite's malady in the Knight's Tale rivals Daniel's in its sophistication and use of technical language.

David Langslow and Brigitte Mair (eds), Body, Disease and Treatment in a Changing World: Latin Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Medicine, Bibliothèque d’Histoire de la Médecine et de la Santé (Lausanne: Éditions BHMS, 2010), pp. xviii + 404, Fr.68.00/€ 55.00, paperback, ISBN: 978-2-9700-6400-8

This volume contains revised and extended versions of twenty-six papers presented at the 9th International Colloquium on Ancient Latin Medical Texts, ‘Language and Context in Latin Medical Texts of the Pre-Salernitan Period’, held at the University of Manchester in 2007. While originally the speakers presented their papers in alphabetical order, a thematic arrangement was deemed more appropriate for the purposes of publication, and this comprises three sections: Graeco-Roman Medicine, Medical Language and Sociolinguistics; Texts, Transmission and Reception; and Words, Meanings and Lexical Fields. There is, perhaps inevitably, a significant amount of overlap with regard to the contents of these three sections, and among the individual papers themselves. This is not necessarily a flaw, however, as these papers generally serve to complement rather than contradict each other, several of them having grown out of collaborative research projects between scholars and institutions. The first section, Graeco-Roman Medicine, Medical Language and Sociolinguistics, contains seven papers that approach aspects of both medical and non-medical works: H. von Staden examines the presentation of parts of the body and the body as a whole in Celsus’ De medicina; F. Le Blay the presentation of the pores in the writings of Lucretius and Seneca; B. Maire the interactions of medical, social and cultural discourse in Mustio’s Gynaecia; M. Baldin the medical terminology used by Plautus, Sallust and Juvenal; and D. Crismani the treatment of lovesickness in Apuleis’ Metamorphoses. More generally, G. Marasco argues that, far from being ignorant and intent on reproducing works of the past, physicians were undertaking research and formulating new theories that would later prove crucial during the Middle Ages. The second section, Texts, Transmission and Reception, contains eleven papers, and it is here that a number of significant new discoveries are presented for the first time: S. Sconocchia publishes four excerpts from the antidotos hiera Pacchi Antiochi; M. Cronier offers some new fragments of one of the three surviving ancient translations of Dioscorides’ De materia medica; A. F. Rodriguez puts forward a fragment of De uirtute uini and a chapter on herba peonia from Thessalus of Tralles’ De plantiis; and A. G. Gonzalez presents the Agriocanna glossary as an addition to the Hermeneumata medicobotanica uetustiora. The third section, Words, Meanings and Lexical Fields, contains eight papers that focus on certain aspects of the medical and non-medical terminology utilised in medical texts, from the names of specific diseases and conditions (digestion, haemorrhois) to the concepts of love (amo and amor) and childhood (puer/puella and infans), to the physical processes by which medicinal remedies were prepared (pounding, pulping and grinding). M. Pardon-Labonnelie incorporates both Latin medical texts and the words inscribed upon collyrium stamps in her discussion of the names of eye diseases, while P. Gaillard-Seux examines the possible contextual reasons for Pliny the Elder’s apparent preoccupation with bites and poisonous substances. Befitting an international colloquium, contributions are written in English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. There are some inconsistencies in the way that they are presented. Some papers include detailed abstracts, others single sentences; some provide abstracts in both English and another language; in the majority of cases the abstracts are in a different language to the paper itself, and the choice of the language of the abstract in relation to the language of the paper is not standardised. Several variations on the Harvard System are utilised for referencing, and quotations from ancient sources are offered in Latin, Greek, English and other languages, or not at all, depending on the paper in question. There is only one illustration (a colour reproduction of MS. Bodley 130, an image that is also reproduced on the cover of the volume), but there are tables throughout. The volume does offer extensive indices (of ancient sources, and Greek and Latin words, forms and phrases) and an exhaustive general bibliography, collated from the bibliographies included in all twenty-six papers and divided into sections: catalogues of manuscripts; editions of ancient and medieval texts (since AD 1700 and before AD 1700); dictionaries, grammars and concordances; and studies for ease of use. Ultimately, Body, Disease and Treatment in a Changing World is a valuable resource for scholars of ancient and medieval medicine.

Disease and its Treatment - (D.) Langslow, (B.) Maire (edd.) Body, Disease and Treatment in a Changing World. Latin Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Medicine. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference ‘Ancient Latin Medical Texts’, Hulme Hall, University of Manchester, 5th–8th September 2007. Pp. xviii + 399, b/w & colour ills. Lausanne: Éditions BHMS, 2010. Paper, €55. ISBN:

Disease and its Treatment - (D.) Langslow, (B.) Maire (edd.) Body, Disease and Treatment in a Changing World. Latin Texts and Contexts in Ancient and Medieval Medicine. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference ‘Ancient Latin Medical Texts’, Hulme Hall, University of Manchester, 5th–8th September 2007. Pp. xviii + 399, b/w & colour ills. Lausanne: Éditions BHMS, 2010. Paper, €55. ISBN: 978-2-9700640-0-8. - Volume 62 Issue 1

Dun, Oxa and Pliny the Great Physician: Attribution and Authority in Old English Medical Texts

Although English vernacular medicine of the late ninth to twelfth centuries draws heavily upon the classical and sub-classical tradition, classical authorities are almost never cited. In fact, citations of any kind are very rare, and the majority of authorities cited in texts compiled before the Norman Conquest are themselves English. Only in the twelfth century are Galen and Hippocrates mentioned for the first time. This suggests a rather self-sufficient medical community in England, with limited historical awareness or contact with wider developments, at least until new Latin medical texts came in from the continent in the eleventh century.

The Liber de heros morbo of Johannes Afflacius and its implications for medieval love conventions.

The disease of love appears in an unbroken chain of medical treatises stretching from sixth-century Byzantium through the Middle Ages to postRenaissance Western Europe. Lovesickness, known variously as amor eros, amor heros, or amor hereos in medieval Latin medical texts, has attracted the attention of literary scholars because many of its symptoms correspond to conventional signs of love in medieval literature. According to George Lyman Kittredge, What to the physician were symptoms. . . became, in the chivalric system, duties ideals of emotion which the true lover must live up to, and which the hypocrite takes pains to counterfeit.' In the late thirteenth century the Catalan physician Arnald of Villanova explicitly compared the disease of love and feudal service in his Tractatus de amore heroico. He claimed that this love called heroic as though lordly (quasi dominalis), not only because it befalls lords, but also either because it dominates, subjugating the soul and ruling a man's heart, or because the acts of such lovers toward the desired object are similar to the acts of servants toward their lords.2 While it is clear from Arnald's definition of heroic love that medicine and literature could offer intersecting views of passionate love in the later Middle Ages, the origins of and motives for that convergence remain obscure. The Arabic medical texts on lovesickness translated by Constantine the African and Gerard of Cremona differ from some literary accounts of love in a key respect: social class is unimportant to the physicians' concerns. Why, then, did Arnald call lovesickness heroic, as though lordly? Put more generally, how did the notion of the nobility of suffering from secular love arise?