The medical Renaissance of the sixteenth century

A. WEAR, R. K. FRENCH, and I. M. LONIE (editors), The medical Renaissance of the sixteenth century, Cambridge University Press, 1985, 8vo, pp. xvi, 350, £35.00. When planning their 1983 conference on renaissance medicine, the editors of this volume had in mind not so much to repeat the traditional picture, which portrays the achievements of a few great figures, as to investigate the typical theoretical and practical concerns of medicine, which, as they rightly remark, are far from well known. The revised papers of that meeting together introduce what is beyond doubt a new phase in the investigation of renaissance medicine. It is their great merit to show that in this medicine the medieval heritage was not thrust aside: its theoretical approaches, certainly in method and to a certain extent in its emphasis on the transmission of a text, demanded scholastic training, and in practice the Arabic authors continued further unchallenged. But at the same time the renaissance physicians not only consciously strove for a new beginning and a reformation in medicine, but also succeeded in bringing it about. The thesis of Huizinga and Diepgen that saw the Renaissance as one part of the declining Middle Ages is here finally refuted. One must look at the medical reformation in all its complex contradictions, e.g. its relationship to the authors of the Middle Ages did not always remain unaffected by the revival of the Classics, but was reformed in a critical way by new knowledge of its inheritance from Antiquity. The book opens with an extraordinarily profound and substantial preface by the editors. It is followed by an interesting study, by Charles Schmitt, of the part played in Italian medical education by Aristotelian philosophy; the history of medicine and the history of philosophy cannot here be separated. Next, Nancy Siraisi and Roger French look at traditional influences on the new medicine, the Canon of Avicenna, and Berengario da Carpi's dependence on scholastic method in his confrontation with his anatomy text. Then in an essay that is well worth reading Vivian Nutton investigates humanist surgery, showing (p. 77 ff) that, contrary to general belief, the influence of Celsus on this new surgery is hardly perceptible. While Richard Palmer continues his earlier studies on Venetian medicine with a typically careful analysis of Venetian pharmacy, Andrew Wear looks at practical medicine and pathology. His intention ofseeing one disease and its treatment in various authors is particularly apt, since he can review in briefall the developments in descriptions of disease. His choice of vertigo is equally well made, since the occurrence of this condition and its relationship to other diseases was already well described in Antiquity. His single citation of Galen, VIII.201-204 K. should have been supplemented by XVIIB.61 1, 677 K., CMG V.9.1, 307-308, and by Aretaeus II1.3 and Caelius, Morb. chron. I. 51-52. His description of the ancient sources, p. 131 ff., would thus have been fuller, and he would certainly not then have ascribed to Avicenna ideas that were already widespread in Antiquity. The next essay, by Gerhard Baader, brings a welcome breadth by looking at the dietetic writings of Jacobus Sylvius in their social context, and shows how medicine was interested in social problems and reacted to them with the means at its disposal. The concluding articles, by Iain Lonie on the Paris Hippocratics, by Andrew Cunningham on the Paduan anatomy project, and by Jerome Bylebyl on the renaissance debates on the pulse, are of fundamental importance, not just for their presentation of new details, but because they document with telling examples the renaissance idea ofmedical progress. Unfortunately, Linda Richardson's study of Fernel and diseases "of total substance" is somewhat inadequate as a treatment of this eminently interesting problem, for which an understanding of the general primary and secondary literature on ancient and medieval pharmacology is essential if one is to place the renaissance arguments on this theme in their proper setting. (Cf. G. Harig, Bestimmung der Intensitat im medizinischen System Galens, 1974; idem, NTM 10, 1973, 764-81; M. R. McVaugh, Arnaldi de Villanova Opera medica omnia, 1975, II, p. 62). Her system of citation of Galenic works is hard to follow, cf. especially note 8, p. 327, as it lacks any cross-reference to the Greek. The volume closes with Luis Garcia-Ballester's piece on Morisco medicine in sixteenth-entury Spain, which extends his earlier important studies and expatiates upon the social reasons for the decline of a once brilliant Arabic medical tradition in Spain.