Premodern Medicine Research Articles

Leprosy in Premodern Medicine. A Malady of the Whole Body

Leprosy in Premodern Medicine. A Malady of the Whole Body

Hybridizing Scholastic Psychology with Chinese Medicine: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Catholic's Conceptions of Xin (Mind and Heart)

This paper explores the dynamics of cultural interactions between early modern China and Europe initiated by the Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries through a case study of Wang Honghan, a seventeenth-century Chinese Catholic who systematically sought to integrate European learning introduced by the missionaries with pre-modern Chinese medicine. Focusing on the ways in which Wang combined his Western and Chinese sources to develop and articulate his views on xin (mind and heart), this paper argues that Wang arrived at a peculiar hybrid between scholastic psychology and Chinese medicine, not so much through a course of haphazard misunderstanding as through his conscious and patterned use and abuse of his Western sources, which was motivated most possibly by a wish to define a theoretical position that most suited his social roles as a Catholic convert and a Chinese medical doctor. Thus, rather than seeing Wang as an epitome of"transmission failure," this paper offers it as a showcase for the tremendous dynamism and creativity occurring at this East-West "contact zone as representatives of both cultures sought to appropriate and transform the symbolic and textual resources of the other side.

Victoria Sweet.Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine. (Studies in Medieval History and Culture.) xvi + 326 pp., illus., bibl., index. New York/London: Routledge, 2006. $75 (cloth).

Victoria Sweet.<i>Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine.<i> (Studies in Medieval History and Culture.)</i></i> xvi + 326 pp., illus., bibl., index. New York/London: Routledge, 2006. $75 (cloth).

Book Review of "Leprosy in Premodern Medicine. A Malady of the Whole Body" by Luke Demaitre PhD

Luke Demaitre's Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body is a highly interesting study of the medical history of leprosy and the medical and social perceptions on leprosy that have been around for centuries. Remarkably, it is likely that leprosy will disappear from the face of the Earth in our generation, thanks to the development of a curative treatment and its increasing availability (although the battle has not yet been won completely). Demaitre's book is a very good read not only for its information about leprosy but also for all interested in or affected by the social phenomenon of stigma. In illnesses such as leprosy, HIV/AIDS, epilepsy, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia, the stigma attached to the condition may be worse than the condition itself.

Victoria Sweet. Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine. New York, Routledge, 2006. xviii, 326 pp., illus. $75 (cloth)

Victoria Sweet. Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky: Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine. New York, Routledge, 2006. xviii, 326 pp., illus. $75 (cloth)

Behavioural phenotypes in disability research: historical perspectives

Western medicine has a long history of accounting for behaviour by reducing the body to ultimate explanatory entities. In pre-modern medicine these were invisible "animal spirits" circulating the body. In modern medicine, they are "genes". Both raise questions. The psychological phenotype is defined by human consensus, varying according to time and place, while the genotype's DNA exists in a realm of material reality. There are deep philosophical and methodological problems in linking one realm to the other. Nyhan's original application of the phenotype-genotype pairing merely claimed that the two realms could be matched because of their common susceptibility to statistical treatment. His behavioural example was "stereotypy". It has since extended to include such things as "social cognition" in Turner's syndrome (Skuse), thus revealing increasingly clearly that the two realms are fundamentally and ontologically separate. The problems are not merely epistemological but ethical, since the looseness of psychological categories involves a blurring of the boundaries between behavioural phenotype and social stereotype. The latter may then be underwritten as "real" by being associated, spuriously, with the empirically demonstrable reality of genetic material.

Ralf Vollmuth, Traumatologie und Feldchirurgie an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit: examplarisch dargestellt anhand der “Grossen Chirurgie” des Walther Herrmann Ryff, Sudhoffs Archiv, Beiheft 45, Stuttgart, Franz Steiner, 2001, pp. 352, illus., ₠44.00 (hardback 3-515-07742-1).

The goal of this study is to present the state of the art in the field of what the author calls “traumatology” (anachronistically using the term of a modern medical discipline), i.e. the treatment of injuries, and military surgery during the transition period from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. At the same time, it aims to provide a critical evaluation of the plausibility and effectiveness of the diagnostic and therapeutic procedures current during that time period. The basis for this evaluation is a thorough examination of the Grosse Chirurgie of Walther Herrmann Ryff, published in 1545. According to the great historian of surgery Ernst Gurlt (1898), Ryff's work is a representative compilation of the then current surgical techniques. The Chirurgie, as Vollmuth claims, not only provides detailed and richly illustrated material, it was also widely read and used. The study starts off with a biographical section on Walther Hermann Ryff which provides basic information on the life and work of this early modern author. However, Vollmuth's emphasis on saving Ryff's reputation is a bit out of touch with the concerns of current historiography of pre-modern medicine. Among other things, he defends the surgeon's honour against the accusation of plagiarism by explaining that copying others' books was quite common at the time. This well-known fact, however, is one of the reasons why the issue of originality and priority has become more or less irrelevant for historians working on early modern medicine, so that Vollmuth's attempt at rehabilitating Ryff seems oddly beside the point. What is even more problematic, however, is the study's analytic strategy. As the author explicitly states (p. 323), it consists in taking Ryff's book apart and reordering it according to modern concerns. Chapter 1 is a description of the surgical instruments shown and described in the Chirurgie. Chapter 2 consists in an alphabetically ordered list of all the drugs occurring in Ryff's book (pp. 82–170). Chapter 3, which the author characterizes as the central chapter, deals with the different injuries, their treatment, and the plausibility and efficacy of the surgical treatment procedures according to modern medical knowledge. The structure of this chapter deliberately follows modern textbooks of surgery (p. 171). The first part is devoted to ‘General surgery’ and includes questions of anaesthesia and pain management, wound treatment, haemostasis and cauterization, complications and post-operative treatment. The second part discusses injuries of various body regions. This peculiar presentist structure might make it easier to find particular topics, in case one wants to compare them with other books, for example, but it also makes it harder to understand Ryff, and his book, in the context of his time. All in all Vollmuth's study combines an amazing erudition and thoroughness concerning philological and antiquarian details on the one hand, with an equally amazing naivety as to the aspects of cultural history of the topic, on the other.

Financing Health Care in the Viceroyalty of Peru: The Hospitals of Lima in the Late Colonial Period

Perceptions of provision for health care in colonial Spanish America are invariably influenced by commonplaces familiar from the comparative history of pre-modern medicine. There is a danger that the reproduction of facile a priori judgements–such as lack of adequate provision, institutional underfunding, deficient nutrition, insanitary conditions, concomitant high mortality rates, and “Dickensian” institutions functioning as workhouses and death-traps for the poor–will distort our understanding of Spanish American health-care systems, such clichés being all too often simplistic, anachronistic, or culturally purblind. Moreover, the whole system, such as it was, may at first sight appear to have depended largely upon the desultory charity of some religious orders and a few pious individuals, with the royal exchequer occasionally rescuing financially-straitened institutions from the brink of bankruptcy and foreclosure. Like most such formulations, there is enough truth to this simplistic scenario for it to be a plausible enough portrait of health care not only in colonial Spanish America but in early modern Spain itself; indeed, of any pre-modern system of health provision. Some of these pejorative impressions–e.g., lack of adequate provision, underfunding–are hardy perennials that even today retain their currency in the wealthiest of welfare states, and are writ especially large in Third World countries. Then as now, such strictures, well-founded or not, are but part of the picture, and overlook considerable institutional achievements in making the best of available resources. Much of this criticism is of course susceptible to quantitative analysis, though statistical data on colonial health care are difficult to come by. As in so many spheres of colonial Spanish America, such figures as are available cluster in the second half of the eighteenth century, a product of the insatiable appetite of Bourbon ministers and bureaucrats for a quantitative dimension to policy-making.