Medieval Medicine Research Articles

Вклад православия в становление социального института здравоохранения в России

The article attempts to build a general picture of the influence of Orthodoxy on the formation of Russian medicine. The influence of Christianity on medicine has already become a subject of research for philosophers, historians and ethicists; therefore, the methodological basis of the research was the idea of the Dilthey hermeneutic circle, which requires going back from consideration of specific aspects to a general panoramic vision of the phenomenon. Based on the analysis of published works and sources on the history of the Church and medicine, a conclusion is made about the institutional and value influence of Orthodoxy on Russian medicine. Institutional influence manifested itself in certain aspects of the formation of the state medical system. First of all, thanks to the transmission of the traditions of ancient medicine by the Church, the foundations of hospital medical care were laid: monastery hospitals became the first organized places of medical care in Russia, from which hospital services for the population in Russia emerged. Another aspect of the institutional influence of Orthodoxy is the creation of the level of nursing staff in hospitals, which began as a community of sisters of mercy. The Church was the inspirer and, in some cases, the direct organizer of the training of nurses and the introduction of their work in hospitals, thus forming the branch of professional nursing education, which later went outside the Church and was adopted by state medicine. Speaking about the influence of the Church on medical science in Russia, we can say that the Church did not initiate any scientific research in the field of medicine and did not provide targeted support for medical research. Monasteries stood at the origins of the emerging medical science in Russia, contributing to the penetration and accumulation of scientific knowledge in the country. The value influence of Christianity on medicine in Russia is determined by the emergence and formation of special ethical views, which became an integral feature of the Russian doctor. In fact, domestic medical ethics originates in monastic hospitals. The main moral principles of Russian medicine are service and love for a person, sacrifice, altruism and selflessness. The ideal of a doctor, faithful to their duty of caring for their patient - a holy doctor - also came to Russian medicine from Orthodoxy. Thus, Orthodoxy played a key role in the formation of organized medical care for the population (the creation of hospitals, the introduction of nurses in medical institutions) and the medical ethics of medicine in Russia.

Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages: Literature, Philosophy, Medicine ed. by Gaia Gubbini

Reviewed by: Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages: Literature, Philosophy, Medicine ed. by Gaia Gubbini Sarah Friedman Gaia Gubbini, ed., Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages: Literature, Philosophy, Medicine ( Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 284 pp. Body and Spirit in the Middle Ages: Literature, Philosophy, Medicine, edited by Gaia Gubbini, consists of fourteen papers presented at a 2014 conference at the Freie Universität Berlin. The conference was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for Gubbini's project "Breath, Sighs, and Spirits in Medieval Romance Literature." The essays in the volume, written in French, English, and Italian, examine how medieval philosophy, medicine, and literature theorized the "body and spirit question," and shed light on "the complex nature of the medieval Self" (11). While the essays are not grouped into themed sections, there are discernible thematic patterns that unite the contributions, which Gubbini helpfully highlights in her introduction. Gubbini, Danielle Jacquart, and Éric Palazzo analyze the multivalent concept of spiritus; Sarah Kay and Joachim Küpper analyze skin, senses, and emotions; Andreas Kablitz, Stephen G. Nichols, and Howard Bloch analyze the dynamics of mind and body through the lens of gender and sexuality; Aurélien Robert and Massimo Ciavolella analyze representations of illness and bodily imbalance; Irene Caiazzo and Nicolas Weill-Parot analyze the relationship between celestial and terrestrial; and, finally, Franco Suitner and Carla Casagrande analyze the representation of body and spirit in the mystic tradition. In addition to the unifying themes that Gubbini identifies, some of the essays connect in their disciplinary focus and methodological similarity. Multiple essays examine literary representations of bodily experience in light of medical, philosophical, and theological writings. Gubbini's contribution, "Corps et esprit: Les ohls espiritaus de Bernard de Ventadour et la maladie de Tristan," draws on the works of Patristic and medical writers to examine how body and spirit converge in representations of psychosomatic experience in the work of Bernard de Ventadour and in Anglo-Norman romances dedicated to the story of Tristan and Iseult. Also focusing on psychosomatic experience in medieval poetry, Ciavolella's "Melancholy and Creativity in Petrarch" examines Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (1330–74; later titled Il Canzoniere) and Secretum (1342–58) alongside classical and medieval philosophical theories of fantasy to underscore how Petrarch represents humoral imbalance and poetic creativity as intertwined. Kablitz's essay, "Petrarch and the Senses: Petrarch's Anthropology of Love and the Scholastic Transformation of Christian Ethics," performs a close reading of sonnets from Canzoniere alongside Aquinas's Quaestiones disputatae de malo (13th c.) to exemplify how scholastic philosophy's "dismissal of the self-evident superiority and power of reason and its consequences" manifests in Petrarch's [End Page 255] poetic corpus (210). Suitner's essay, "La poésie mystique: Iacopone de Todi et les contradictions de l'âme," demonstrates how the Franciscan poet Jacopone da Todi drew heavily on Franciscan mysticism's Christocentric presentation of the body as a vehicle for both sin and salvation. Instead of examining how nonliterary genres of texts influenced literary texts, Robert's essay, "Amour, imagination, et poésie dans l'oevre médicale de Gentile da Foligno," examines the presence of literary tropes within fourteenth-century Italian physician Gentile da Foligno's commentary on Avicenna's Canon. The essay compellingly demonstrates the link between Gentile da Foligno's analysis of Avicenna and poetic descriptions of lovesickness in works by Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Cavalcanti. Other essays, such as Küpper's "The Medical, the Philosophical, and the Theological Discourses on the Senses," Weill-Parot's "'Le contact virtuel' entre un esprit et un corps et l'action à distance," and Caiazzo's "Le philosophie, les astres, et la physiognomy au XIIIe siècle," connect in their examination of how the disciplines of medicine, philosophy, theology, and even astrology mutually influenced one another and, at times, diverged in their conceptualizations of the body and spirit. Küpper considers the differences and similarities between how medieval theologians and physicians conceived of "post-sensory processing mechanisms" (112). He highlights key differences in how these disciplines approached the question of how the mind converts "quantitative into qualitative data" (112), and compellingly argues that one observes "an acceptance of theoretical plurality" within "official" medieval...

Juliana Cummings, Medicine in the Middle Ages: Surviving the Times, Yorkshire and Philadelphia: Pen & Sword Books, 2021, 197 pp., 16 pp. insert of b/w prints on glossy paper.

Abstract This account of late medieval medicine is unusual in being the first non-fiction book by the author of several historical novels set in the period, most recently of “a historical romance of Vlad the Impaler” (2020). Juliana Cummings has a long-standing fascination with her family’s history back to the time of Henry VII of England (1457–1509), when male ancestors fought in the king’s army, and with the medical perils people faced even in times of relative peace and prosperity. Responding to her treatment of medicine and mortality in novels and short stories, an editor from Pen & Sword History reached out to Cummings and suggested she write this book. The aim is to instruct those who know little about medicine before the present day and to do so in a read­able fashion, with reliable background information about the development of medical knowledge since Greco-Roman times. Obviously, this is not a book for specialists, but a good gift for friends and relatives, especially younger ones who wonder what things were like in earlier times and how people managed to live through them. Hence the book’s subtitle, “Surviving the Times.”

Filozofia starożytna a medycyna średniowieczna. Refleksje na marginesie książki Beaty Wojciechowskiej Flebotomia i purgowanie, czyli o leczeniu w wiekach średnich

Ancient Philosophy and Medieval Medicine. Reflections on the Margins of Flebotomia i purgowanie, czyli o leczeniu w wiekach średnich [Phlebotomy and purging, or about medical treatment in the Middle Ages] The article discusses ancient philosophical sources for humourism. It focuses on the philosophical context described in the fi rst chapter of Beata Wojciechowska’s book Flebotomia i purgowanie, czyli o leczeniu w wiekach średnich [Phlebotomy and purging, or about medical treatment in the Middle Ages]. The author briefl y points out the differences between the Epicurean, Stoic, Peripatetic and Academic positions on the nature of the soul, its relation to the body and the universe.

Modern European sexological and orientalist assimilations of medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah to erotology

This article discusses the term erotology, which was applied to medieval Islamicate ‘ilm al-bah (the science of coitus), as well as other world traditions of sexual knowledge, by European sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who contrasted it with their own forms of inquiry into sexual matters in the modern field of sexual science. It argues that the homogenisation and minimisation of all ancient and non-European forms of medical knowledge about sex, even one as substantial as the ‘ilm al-bah tradition, supported a particular story about the origins of sexology's own emergence as a new and unprecedented biomedical and scientific way of knowing, characterised by an opposition assumed between sexuality and religion, by a view of sexual variations as perversions or pathologies, and by a view of Arabs and Muslims as sexually excessive. The article focusses on French, English, German, Austrian, and Italian sources of the 19th century that discussed the history of sexual medicine, relating these accounts to recent attempts to historicise sexology. It considers how forms of colonial hierarchy and exoticist views of non-European cultures impacted the dismissal of ‘ilm al-bah among European sexual scientists and how they may continue to exert an influence on forms of modern historical inquiry that are not attentive to scholarship on medieval Islamicate sexual medicine.

The Sururgia of Nicholas Neesbett: Writing Medical Authority in Later Medieval England

Summary The surgical recipe book of Nicholas Neesbett, a fifteenth-century practitioner in northern Yorkshire, is a unique artefact in the history of medieval English medicine. Though Neesbett had little Latin and no formal training, his vernacular surgical manual bridges two distinct forms of expertise often at odds in medieval medicine, merging the traditions of the learned Latin surgery with the hands-on experiential knowledge of the empiric. This article publishes Neesbett’s manuscript, a portion of MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ashmole 1438, contributing to a growing number of studies that focus on medical manuscripts as instruments of practice. The Section ‘The Surgical Manual in Medieval Medicine’ situates Neesbett’s ‘Sururgia’ within the context of learned and vernacular medical manuscripts in later medieval England. The Section ‘A Medical Man Makes His Mark’ reveals both Neesbett’s textual influences and the everyday practices of exchange, manufacture and collection that generated medical knowledge among rural practitioners. The Appendix contains a full diplomatic transcription of the previously unpublished manuscript.

The Humors in Hume's Skepticism

In the conclusion to the first book of the Treatise, Hume’s skeptical reflections have plunged him into melancholy. He then proceeds through a complex series of stages, resulting in renewed interest in philosophy. Interpreters have struggled to explain the connection between the stages. I argue that Hume’s repeated invocation of the four humors of ancient and medieval medicine explains the succession, and sheds a new light on the significance of skepticism. The humoral context not only reveals that Hume conceives of skepticism primarily as a temperament, not a philosophical view or system. It also resolves a puzzle about how Hume can view skepticism as both an illness and a cure. The skeptical temperament can, depending on its degree of predominance, either contribute to or upset the balance of temperaments required for proper mental functioning.

Medieval Turkic healing traditions and written artifacts

A special place in the modern scientific direction is occupied by ethnographic research of the tradi- tions of traditional medicine on the basis of different ethnic groups, their practical application through popularization among the population. One of the most important issues in the study of the “Seven Facets of the Great Steppe” and the ethnocultural system of the peoples of Central Asia and Kazakhstan is the ethnomedicine of nomadic peoples, which was used on the territory of medieval Kazakhstan. In the period of rapid development of modern science, it is necessary to supplement the study of medieval folk medicine with new ethnographic materials and a comprehensive study of the history of field ethnomedi- cine. One of these medieval writings in a medical context is Dastur al-’ilaj (Tradition of Medicine), writ- ten in the first half of the 16th century by Sultan Ali al-Khorasani, the personal physician of a nomadic khan. The aim of the study is to analyze the relationship between the healing arts and the culture of the peoples of the Great Steppe based on the written heritage by studying the culture and history of no- madic peoples. During the study of the topic, the number of sources with information about traditional medicine was increased and unpublished manuscripts were introduced, analyzed on the materials of published studies using comparative historical and linguocultural methods to study the morphological structures, meaning and content of words, including text analysis. Key words: manuscripts, folk medicine, medieval written monuments, Chagatai language, healing tradition. &nbsp

Perception and treatment of melancholy in the writings of Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098-1179)

Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098-1179) was a medieval nun and an abbess, a mystic, a composer, a poet, an author of medical treatises, and one of the few women at the time who wrote both theological and scientific texts. In this paper, I analyze Hildegard’s book Liber subtilitatum diversarum naturarum creaturarum (Book of Subtleties of the Diverse Nature of Creatures), compiled around 1151-1158 and consisting of two books: Physica and Causae et curae. The aim of this study is to understand how the phenomenon of melancholy in its three meanings (as body fluid, character type, and a disease) was perceived by one of the brightest medieval thinkers. Even though Hildegard’s writings were influenced by deep knowledge of the Scripture, the abbess also accepted Greco-Roman medical system (classical humoral theory), astrology, medieval agricultural worldview, and the wisdom of folk medicine. Melancholy was interpreted in Hildegard’s medical texts as a heart and a brain disease which was caused by the overabundance of black bile produced in the spleen. The abbess recommended various medicinal herbs (fennel, mallow, primrose, rue, etc.) and substances of animal (ostrich, heron, ants) and mineral (onyx) origin in order to reduce excessive amount of black bile. Hildegard explained the mechanism of action of these medications using concepts of humoral theory, principle of contraria contrariis, as well as knowledge of medieval folk medicine and elements of religious and magical healing.

Brain Awareness Week 2021 at Ibn Sina Academy (India): A Report

Brain- and neuroscience-related diseases and research are an important aspect to be discussed and explored at public interest. International Brain Research Organization (IBRO) is an international organization that is involved in spearheading both these activities. Brain Awareness Week (BAW) was never organized in a city which gave rise to the foundation of “Indian Academy of Neurosciences (IAN).” Stalwarts like Professor P. N. Saxena, Professor Om Chandra, Professor Mahdi Hasan, Professor K. C. Singhal, etc. did some significant efforts to promote neuroscience and brain research in Aligarh. They also established “Interdisciplinary Brain Research Centre” at Aligarh Muslim University and organized many scientific events including the Fifth Annual Conference of the IAN from December 7 to December 9, 1986. They also established “Interdisciplinary Brain Research Centre” at Aligarh Muslim University. Likewise, Ibn Sina Academy of Medieval Medicine and Sciences is another institution where a large number of publications on neuroscience exist. With this background, BAW with a theme, “Neuroscience through the ages to modern times” was organized by the courtesy of IBRO-APRC Brain Awareness Week Grant. The exhibition of publications extant at Ibn Sina Academy (depicting history of neuroscience since medieval era specially the works of medieval Arabs who played a significant role in the growth of neurosurgery) and public awareness lectures on importance of neuroscience research helped in some extent to increase public awareness, foster public enthusiasm and interest in the younger generation. Students of all science disciplines including Unani medicine were invited to participate at various events such as presentation of postal stamps on neuroscience, paintings, essay writing competition, and poetry on brain and neuroscience.

MO1033URINE EXAMINATION - A CHALLENGE FOR NEPHROLOGISTS FROM ANCIENT TIMES

Abstract Background and Aims Extensive archaeological material indicates that records of the treatment of kidney disease without examining the cause and solely by examining the appearance of urine date back to ancient times. To this day, the basic clinical approach to nephrology patient included an overview of freshly sampled urine from the uncatheterized bladder and monitoring of urine output.The aim of the paper is to analyze the history of the urine analysis. Method Data were collected from books, magazines, encyclopedias and databases. Results The first nephrological experiences and doctrines that connected the clinical picture with diseases of the urinary bladder, kidneys or liver were written down in the opus Corpus Hippocraticium, which contains a total of 53 works. Opus Hippocraticium contains in its work Aphorisms a total of 22 aphorisms dedicated to uroscopy. Such examinations revealed specific changes in urine that were considered important for the onset and maintenance of the disease (Predictions II paragraphs 567,569,571). Galen (Claudios Galenos) is the most famous representative of Roman medicine and a follower of the teachings of Hippocrates. In his work De crisibus (K IX, 550-668) he described in detail the changes in urine.The physicians who marked the first and second centuries with their work on urine specificities were Selius Aurelianus (Tarde Passiones V, 3) and Cornelia Celsus (De Medicina 4:17). The apostate Oribazi (Oribasius of Pergamum; 325-403) wrote a "Medical Collection" which consists of 70 books. The importance of uroscopy for the prognosis of diseases is also described in the texts on secretions in this collection.Etius of Amida wrote (Aetius 502-575) a very semi-paired collection of "Sixteen Books of Medicine". In Book V of his work he wrote 15 chapters on the characteristics of urine. He incorporated the described changes in urine into the theory of four types of body fluids. Due to the advanced approach, this collection became the basis of all subsequent works on uroscopy.Pavle Eginski (625-690) is an Alexandrian student who practiced uroscopy and is the author of seven books entitled "Excerpts from Medicine" in which he introduces new concepts and describes in detail how to collect and examine urine. At that time, the greatest contribution to uroscopy was considered to have been made by Magnus Emesianus with his classification of urine characteristics.The most famous representative of medicine from the Byzantine era is Theophilus Protospatorius (VII century) a physician, monk, and philosopher of the Byzantine period wrote (De Urinis 68-70), a treatise on urine which was translated into Arabic and Hebrew and highly esteemed among the urologists of the time. Serbian medieval medicine was a synthesis of Western European and Byzantine science.Scientific access to treatment and permanent medical education was provided in the monastery hospitals (typical of the Hilandar / Studenica monastery), but very few manuscripts from that period have been preserved. The most extensive and significant medieval medical manuscript in the Serbian language is the "Hilandar Medical Codex".In the "Journal of Uroscopy", 62 paragraphs are dedicated to Byzantine uroscopy-macroscopic examination of changes in urine. Uroscopy has been developed until the introduction of the forerunner microscope for examining urine at the end of the 16th century. The application of microscopy in the examination of urine is constantly being improved, and the first automatic analysis of urinary sediment was done in 1985. Conclusion Although urine analysis has been used since ancient times, today the diagnosis depends a lot on the quality of interpretation of the findings. Despite attempts to standardize urine sediment analysis using various methods as a cheap and non-invasive method, it is still not sufficiently used in differentiating different kidney diseases.

‘YOUR LOVE IS LIKE BAD MEDICINE’: THE MEDICAL TRADITION OF LOVESICKNESS IN THE LEGENDS OF HIPPOCRATES AND ERASISTRATUS OF CEOS

The image of the lover physically afflicted by erōs, with erratic pulse and fiery flushes under the skin, goes back at least as far as Sappho. Ancient doctors like Galen and Oribasius of Pergamon saw the lovesick as a patient with a real disease in need of medicalintervention. In Western medieval medicine, the disease had various names, such as amor heroes and erotomania. This study defines lovesickness as erotomania, a psychosomatic illness with depressive symptoms caused by unrequited love, with its roots sometimes sought in a humoral imbalance of black bile, an excess of seminal fluid or in some inflammation of the brain. It traces this tradition to the anecdotes about the physicians Hippocrates and Erasistratus of Ceos on how they diagnosed and treated royal patients suffering from lovesickness. It is argued that these stories reflect real-life medical debates. The anecdotes suggest the cause of the disease to have been seen as psychic rather than purely physiological and somatic, calling for a therapy one might term psychological. They suggest the choice treatment for a patient suffering from sick unrequited love was to requite the demands of erōs.

Avicenna: vérvétel vagy vérleengedés? Tanulmány egy középkori arab orvosi eljárásról, amely tartalmazza a Kánon első könyve egy fejezetének fordítását.

Blood-sampling or/and bloodletting as an alternative therapy in medieval Arab medicine may have occurred for a variety of reasons: either after the failure of herbal treatment, or specific treatment of serious and infectious diseases (e.g., smallpox, measles, liver disease) or when the patient's blood loss for another reason was to be offset by this. During the adjunctive treatment, there was not the amount of drained blood of primary importance, but the change in the condition and characteristics of the blood during draining and the restoration of the quality characteristics/balance of the blood. Concerning the blood purification (restoration of the quantitative balance of the blood), primarily the amount of bloodletting was significant and precisely determined. In such cases, the aim was to restart the blocked blood flow, redirecting it from one place to another, and removing the excess blood and bodily fluids. According to vascular occlusion, “congestion,” leads to inflammation, which then progresses to a variety of diseases, maintaining a balance of qualitative and quantitative variables is often associated with medicine.

Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski

Reviewed by: Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski Aylin Malcolm (bio) Julie Orlemanski, Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, x + 333pp. $69.95 cloth. The events of 2020 revealed the importance of effective communication in healthcare and the potential for epidemics to inspire new narrative projects, concretizing decades of research on the intersections between literature and medicine. Though its publication anticipated these developments by several months, Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects is an important contribution to such discussions and to the study of premodern medicine, a field generally dominated by historical methods. Orlemanski offers a sophisticated new perspective on the entanglements of literature and phisik—a Middle English term that includes both academic approaches to healing and more diffuse local practices—in late medieval England. Her deliberately anachronistic use of "symptom," which she defines as "a somatic disturbance that … provokes interpretation," speaks to the parallels between diagnosing a body and analyzing a text; both projects require one to interpret visible signs in the context of larger semiotic systems, a fact recognized by many medieval writers (p. 16). As her title suggests, the book also considers what Orlemanski calls "embodied subjectivity," characterized by the tension between physical susceptibility and the medieval emphasis on free will (p. 2). Orlemanski is particularly interested in individuals who reflect on their own bodies or pathologies, thereby addressing the "gap between one's materiality and one's experience, or between having and being a body" (p. 3). While Symptomatic Subjects will appeal most to those specializing in the late Middle Ages, its rigorous engagement with both literary criticism and the history of medicine is likely to interest a range of scholars. An evident strength of the book is its careful close readings, which address canonical texts (e.g., Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale) alongside others that are often overlooked (e.g., John Lydgate's "Dietary;" Robert Henryson's "Sum Practysis of Medecyne"). Many of these textual interpretations include studies of individual manuscripts; in particular, the Wound Man (a standard diagram of the various injuries that a physician might treat) in Wellcome Library MS 290 serves as an emblem of Orlemanski's project, embodying her interests in the relationships between particulars and general causes, as well as the tension between human agency and vulnerability. Each text or object is contextualized with generous references, such that the reader trained in a different field will likely require no further notes. Indeed, while the book has a clear overarching narrative, it often recapitulates essential information in multiple chapters; each chapter might therefore be read independently without additional context, a welcome feature in the age of digital downloads. [End Page 231] Structured as four parts of two chapters each, Symptomatic Subjects progresses from an overview of medieval medical knowledge to its effects on literary genres, plot, and voice, with a brief coda on the early modern afterlives of phisik. Orlemanski begins by surveying medicine in late medieval England, where the absence of formal medical institutions produced a diverse constellation of beliefs and practices. Chapter two delves more deeply into four aspects of phisik: the etiological schemata through which physicians ascribed medical conditions to causes, the decentralized and heterogeneous character of medical authority, the tendency for physicians to read bodies as signs with identifiable meanings, and the relationships between content and layout in medical manuscripts. Both chapters offer not only useful information about medical practices, but also perceptive analyses of medical writing, as Orlemanski applies her considerable critical skills to texts not often read as literature. The next two chapters examine satire, which often criticized the obscure jargon and earthly materialism of medical texts, and exempla, or short anecdotes illustrating moral principles, a very common narrative form during the late Middle Ages. The fourth chapter's comparisons between exemplary narratives and medical case studies are especially enlightening, providing clear evidence of the fluid relationship between medieval literature and medicine, and thus of the importance of Orlemanski's work. Central to this chapter is Orlemanski's notion of the "etiological imagination," or the creative process of envisioning causation with...

Medical Terms in the Arabic Manuscript Kitāb al-mi’a fi al-ṭibb (“Hundred Books on the Skills of Medicine”) by Abu Sahl Isa b. Yahya al-Masihi (the 11th Century)

The article is based on the manuscript “Hundred books on skills of Medicine” by Abu Sahl al-Masihi from the collection of the Oriental Department of the Gorky Library of St. Petersburg State University (Ms. O 667). The author of this written monument was regarded as the teacher of Ibn Sina (Avicenna). The text of Abu Sahl al-Masihi is an encyclopedic medical treatise of the XI century. It consists of one hundred “books”, each of which is a separate and independent chapter dedicated to a specific problem of theoretical or practical medicine. The article presents an analysis of Arabic medical terms found in the table of contents to the first book. They can be divided into four categories: borrowings from other languages, obsolete terms, terms found in the Qur’an, and terms with Arabic roots. The authors of the article cited fragments of Quranic texts as an illustration of the early origin of some terms for physiological states. The medical knowledge and traditions of the Arabs played a decisive role in the development of Arab-Muslim medieval medicine. Medical terms of the Arabs, introduced into scientific circulation in the early Middle Ages, are actively used in modern Arabic. The results of the lexical analysis of medical terminology from the first “book” of the treatise reflect the scale of the phenomenon called Arab-Muslim medieval medicine.

Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health by Sara Ritchey

Reviewed by: Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health by Sara Ritchey Giulia Giamboni Sara Ritchey, Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021), xiv + 310 pp. Sara Ritchey's book Acts of Care explores women's everyday practices in the southern Low Countries during the thirteenth century. Ritchey argues that feminine caregiving was not just a manifestation of religious fervor, devotion, and piousness, as it has been commonly framed. Rather, these practices constituted an important yet understudied component of the broader field of medieval medicine. Exploring diverse practices such as healing prayers, birthing indulgences, medical blessings, liturgical images, and penitential observations reveals that women were highly knowledgeable about health and the body, and active participants in premodern European medicine. Women's medical engagement is a history made of "fragile traces" excluded from university-trained medical treatises (4). Instead, we find traces in liturgy, miracles, poetry, meditations, sacred objects, and the testaments and endowments from hospitals and leprosaria populated by Cistercian nuns and beguines. Ritchey builds on the methodologies of performance studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, the history of enslaved communities in North America and the Caribbean, and from medical anthropology of sub-Saharan Africa in order to recover the therapeutic epistemologies of medieval European women. These methodologies offer new tools "for making visible voices and presences" silenced by technologies of power (28–29). [End Page 283] Acts of Care is divided into three sections that mirror Ritchey's research questions and sources. Part 1 presents hagiographic sources from the thirteenth-century liégeois corpus whose protagonists were "new" saints, that is, those saints still not officially canonized by the church. This body of saints' lives illuminates the ways in which holy people developed cults and attracted communities of faithful while they were still alive. Because miracle stories taking place at tombs, relics from women saints, and stories about miraculous posthumous healing were told and performed by women, these sources show how manifesting sanctity was gendered feminine. The liégeois corpus is also revealing about care and authority. Ritchey indicates that feminized forms of care were integral yet excluded from the European health care system. Women's affective labor performed through prayers and through the recitation of psalms and dramatic poetry for the sick was highly valued in the healing of wounds, performing obstetric services, and caring for people with diverse afflictions. Part 2 turns to masculine constructions and conceptualizations of therapeutic discourse and knowledge by using a matrix of authoritative discourse, theological, medical, and hagiographic texts. Premodern medical theory conceived of the internal body as made of humors and qualities. The balance or imbalance of them determined a patient's sickness or health. Other elements corresponded to the comportment of the body—the so-called non-naturals. These elements referred to the six factors external to the body—air, food and drink, diet and rest, sleeping and waking, evacuation and retention, and the passions of the soul—and were understood to influence bodily health in humoral medicine. The presence of the non-naturals in medical terminology and texts indicates that emotional care was as vital as other therapeutic remedies to bodily health. Further, their presence reveals that there was a certain degree of anxiety among authoritative discourses, particularly in relation to the passions of the souls and to verbal forms of medicine—charms, incantations, and prayers. Instead of denying the efficacity of these widespread and popular remedies, university-trained male authorities sought to regulate the circumstances in which verbal medicine could work—only trained male physicians could properly use and harness these words. Theologians and hagiographers also expressed anxieties about the place of the soul in scientific medicine. Ritchey argues that religious authors challenged Scholastic medical authors' rationalization as it could erode the place of God in bodily health. Part 3 interrogates women's actual knowledge of the body and its care. Ritchey explores modes of knowledge transmission in women's religious communities, such as beguinages and their affiliated hospitals. Prayers, liturgies, images, and poetry—interpreted through the lens of performative studies—reveal women's "therapeutic technology" made of psalters, charms, blessings, relics, meditations, and prayers in addition to...

Kultura pamćenja začetaka srpske medicine

The study of the history of medicine has developed two approaches: traditional and new, which is more comprehensive. The traditional approach implies the study of important individuals and ideas, the advancement of medicine as a science. This approach is widely accepted in both our and world science. The second, which is much more comprehensive, was initiated by Henry Sigerst with his works, and expanded and came to life in the 1960s and 1970s. The authors of the paper approach the study and presentation of Serbian medieval medicine with the cause-and-effect relationship of health and disease and other medical-historical phenomena and analyze them in a social, cultural and political context. From this point of view, the authors connect the mentioned contests with modern medical problems and approaches. The aim of this paper is to investigate and present the development of Serbian medicine in the Middle Ages, the conditions under which it was formed and developed, as well as the influence of the Serbian state and church on it. The first hospitals were established under the protection of Christian monasteries in the East, but also in the West. In addition to the first hospitals, the ideas of social medicine were born in the Middle Ages, under the influence of Christian thought. All this is a significant contribution to European medicine, the basis without which further development of medical science in the Renaissance would not be possible. The first real hospitals as treatment institutions in medieval Serbia were established in the period from the 13th to the 17th century. The collected historical material indicates the fact that there were nineteen of them. Hospitals were built and arranged on the model of already existing hospitals built on the soil of Byzantium. The monastery hospitals have a significant historical role, because they introduced Serbian medicine into the family of the then European medicine. It should be especially emphasized that Serbia was at the forefront of medicine at that time, because it had special (separate) departments for the treatment of patients with epilepsy and mental illness. A special place is occupied by the monastery hospital Hilandar on the Holy Mountain and the monastery hospital in Studenica. Along with the establishment of hospitals, they are also working on medical education, in the beginning more according to the mentoring principle, so that from the period of King Milutin's rule, the first medical school was established. In the organizational sense, the Serbian monastery hospitals laid the foundations of today's hospital organization, starting from the place for construction, equipment and working conditions, through the election of directors, doctors, medical and non-medical staff, to ethical norms.

Administrative and legal characteristics of the primary historical stages of origin, formation and deve - lopment of medical care

This article is devoted to the doctrinal study of the genesis of the origin, formation and development of health care, resulting ina study of traditions, customs that have been passed down from generation to generation.The periodization of the history of medicine in Ukraine is formed, which is expediently presented in the form of its systematizationand to formulate its stages, namely: the initial stage (600 million years ago to the XII-VI millennium BC); stage of Kievan Rus(IX century to XIII century); Polish-Lithuanian stage (including Cossack statehood) (XIV to the first half of the XVII cen tury); Theimperial stage (includes the reigns of Peter I, Catherine II and Nicholas II) (XVIII – to the XIX century), the Soviet stage (XX century),the stage of Ukrainian independence (second half of the XX century), the stage of Modern Ukraine (early XXI cen tury – to this day).Also, it was concluded that the main features of the “Initial stage” of the formation and development of medical care are:1) begins to be used in the provision of medical care herbal medicines; 2) there is a use of drugs that determine the mechanism of actionon the human body, namely: narcotic effects, stimulant effects, tonic effects, etc.; 3) the use of magic in the provision of medical care,which arose as a result of empirical research. Accordingly, the main features of the “stage of Kievan Rus” formation and developmentof medical care are: 1) the development of pagan treatment; 2) active development and implementation of the monastic direction oftreatment; 3) the use of folk medicine in the treatment of patients; 4) dissemination of knowledge and practical skills by monks of theKiev-Pechersk Lavra to neighboring lands; 5) the introduction of monastic hospitals, where monks were so humane to the sick to thepoint of self-sacrifice; 6) monasteries became centers of culture and education; 7) there was a separation of such areas of medical careas surgical, orthopedic and therapeutic, etc.

Monastic Hospitals in Byzantine Egypt: Pachomius and Shenoute's Hospitals as Coenobitic models

Monastic Hospitals in Byzantine Egypt: Pachomius and Shenoute's Hospitals as Coenobitic models

Unsettling Comparisons

AbstractWhile many areas of scholarship are already well into critical examinations of their global turns, one area that is not is the study of early medieval medicine. The number of global comparative approaches for this corpus are few and limited in scope, but this is an ideal time to consider the ethics of how scholars deploy comparisons between the medicine of early medieval England and other medicines, particularly those of American Indigenous peoples. This article argues for ethical comparative approaches between medieval medical corpora and the cultures and archives of American Indigenous peoples and for using decolonial and comparative considerations to guide the future of a scholarship whose framework is increasingly global.