In Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds Darrel Amundsen explores the disputed boundaries of medicine and Christianity by focusing on the principle of the sanctity of human life, including the duty to treat or attempt to sustain the life of the ill. As he examines his themes and moves from text to context, Amundsen clarifies a number of Christian principles in relation to bioethical issues that are hotly debated today. In his examination of the moral stance (...) of the earliest syphilographers, for example, he finds insights into the ethical issues surrounding the treatment of AIDS, which he believes has its closest historical antecedent not in plague but in syphilis. He also shows that the belief that all healing comes from God, whether directly, through prayer, or through the use of medicine -- a sentiment commonly held by contemporary Christians -- cannot be accurately attributed to any extant source from the patristic period. Indeed, all the Church Fathers were convinced that healing sometimes came from evil sources: Satan and his demons were able to heal, for example, and Asclepius was a demon "to be taken very seriously indeed.". (shrink)

The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity. By Ahmed Ragab. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 263. $99.99, £64.99, $80.

The following article is the concluding piece of a series on the vernacularization of science, medicine, and technology in the Late Middle Ages inaugurated in 1998 with a special issue of ESM and continued with two articles in ESM in 1999, featuring papers selected by William Crossgrove and Linda Ehrsam Voigts. All of these articles grew out of a series of papers presented at the Thirty-Second International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in May 1997, a series which (...) now concludes with the present. (shrink)

Arabian Drugs in Early Medieval Mediterranean Medicine. By Zohar Amar and Efraim Lev. Edinburgh Studies in Classical Islamic History and Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv + 290, ills. $125, £80.

Book reviewed in this article: Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds. By Darrel W. Amundsen.

The ArgumentIn this paper I try to analyze the fate of a new medical model that was developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in European Latin society, particularly in the southern parts of Latin Europe. This model won the approval of the communities in which it was developed as part of an incipient network of medical care and attention. The new healer (Christian and male )that emerged from this model, whether physician or surgeon, based his practice on his knowledge (...) of Aristotelian natural philosophy. He was an intellectual and a social product fashioned and supported by traditional and new urban leader groups, whether civil or ecclesiastic, Christian or Jewish. Health and healers were considered part of the urban social organization both in large cities and in smaller towns.Full social acceptance of this new model was achieved only after heated debate. In practice, the new way of conceiving of medicine did not begin to become socially accepted outside intellectual circles until the new healer was able to offer specific solutions for the maintenance or restoration of health, both at an individual and at a collective level, and according to the criteria and feelings of the leader groups of the society of that time.Progress in research allows us to identify nene factors, at least, that were involed in the construction of these novelties in late medieval Latin society. (shrink)

In describing and explaining the sexes, medicine and science participated in the delineation of what was "feminine" and what was "masculine" in the Middle Ages. Hildegard of Bingen and Albertus Magnus, among others, writing about gynecology, the human constitution, fetal development, or the naturalistic dimensions of divine Creation, became increasingly interested in issues surrounding reproduction and sexuality. Did women as well as men produce procreative seed? How did the physiology of the sexes influence their healthy states and their susceptibility to (...) disease? Who derived more pleasure from sexual intercourse, men or women? The answers to such questions created a network of flexible concepts which did not endorse a single model of male-female relations, but did affect views on the health consequences of sexual abstinence for women and men and on the allocation of responsibility for infertility - problems with much social and religious significance in the Middle Ages. Sometimes at odds with, and sometimes in accord with other forces in medieval society, medicine and natural philosophy helped to construct a set of notions that divided significant portions of the world - from the behavior of animals to the operations of astrological signs - into "masculine" and "feminine." Even cases that seemed to exist outside the definitions of this duality, for example, hermaphrodite features or homosexual behavior, were brought under control by the application of gendered labels, such as "masculine women.". (shrink)

The papers in this volume question how perceptions of space influenced understandings of the body and its functions, illness and treatment, and the surrounding natural and built environments in relation to health in the classical and ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 273-274 [Access article in PDF] Christoph Lüthy, John E. Murdoch, and William R. Newman, editors. Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. viii + 610. Cloth, $186.00. The nineteen papers of this weighty (handsomely produced, but expensive) volume are mostly devoted to the views of one thinker or group of persons on "corpuscularism" (see 17ff.), in (...) either physics or mathematics, with few synthetic or diachronic studies. Only a quarter of the volume is devoted to the medieval period: Danielle Jacquart on minima in the Salerno school of medicine (twelfth century); the late George Molland on Roger Bacon's and Grosseteste's "corpuscular tendencies"; Charles Lohr on Ramon Lull; John Murdoch on minima naturalia in the medieval and Renaissance periods; and the greater part of William Newman's study of corpuscularian conceptions in "Aristotelian alchemy" from Geber to Sennert. The early-modern part includes studies on mostly expected figures: Francesco Patrici, Giordano Bruno, the Northumberland circle, Francis Bacon, David Gorlaeus (a little-known Dutch theology student; 1591-1612, sic), Daniel Sennert, Honoré Fabri, Galileo, Gassendi, Charleton, Boyle, Locke, and Homberg. Alan Gabbey more generally distinguishes different patterns of explanations in mechanical philosophy.As far as I can judge, the authors are knowledgeable and competent, and the studies make important contributions. But just because this is a high-quality volume produced with the ambition of making a step toward rewriting the history of a major chapter in the history of science, its two significant and principled deficiencies must be pointed out.The volume follows the intention of "show[ing] the debt of early-modern matter theory to previous traditions and thereby [explaining] its bewildering heterogeneity" (back cover). Now, the study of the corpuscular traditions in the pre-modern period is certainly an important desideratum (although this volume again attends chiefly to the early modern corpuscularians). But the motivation and perspective here announced—the medieval period [End Page 273] is to be studied because early modern science is indebted to it—are astoundingly Whiggish. Worse: the study of the entire Arabic-Islamic tradition is dismissed, on the grounds that "Islamic atomism does not seem to have been of any influence upon Christian fourteenth-century atomism" (8): this is not only Whiggism, but also frank and explicit euro- and Christian-centrism, which in the beginning of the twenty-first century is simply stunning. The method amusingly consists in affirming the consequent: presupposing that "Islamic atomism" did not influence the West and early-modern science, no scholar was asked to examine whether or not this was indeed the case, with the congenial result that the volume seemingly confirms the initial presupposition. Q.E.D. Similarly and no less regrettably, the fact that (ps.-) Geber's Summa Perfectionis is not, as Lasswitz had thought, the translation of an Arabic work is here used as grounds on which to dismiss altogether his claim concerning the importance of the Arabic input (13, but see also 293). This way, incomprehension between civilizations is reinforced instead of being reduced, and I believe we did not need September 11 to know this.The thusly dismissed Mu'tazilite school of Islamic theology had important repercussions in Judaism, so that referring to it as "Islamic atomism" is misleading (see notably Hagai Ben-Shammai, "Studies in Karaite Atomism," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 6 [1985]: 243-93). The volume's forty-page cumulative bibliography, for which the editors are to be congratulated, reflects the volume's parochial viewpoint: H. A. Wolfson's important The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), with some 150 pages on atomism, is not included; nor is the (English version of the) landmark study by the late S. Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1997; the original 1936 German version is mentioned). Wolfson's study, incidentally, shows that the editors' presupposition (8) that the Kalâm tradition could have influenced the West only via the Latin translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is unwarranted, for Isaac... (shrink)

힐데가르트의 의학적 사상은 중세시대 많은 공헌을 했다고 평가할 수 있으며, 특히 그 당시 그리스도교라는 전통 안에서 잊혀질 수 있었던 여성의 역할을 복원하는데 큰 기여를 했다. 그녀가 생존했던 중세시대 특성상 여성성의 발견이나 여성의 권리와 역할 확대 등에 관해 직접적으로 다루지는 않았지만, 남성과 여성을 지배와 피지배 관계가 아닌 상호 협력해야 하는 관계로 규정했다는 점에서 여성학자로 규정될 수 있다. 중세시대 여성 활동이 극히 제한적으로 허용되던 당시, 사회적 편견을 극복하고 여성의 역할을 확장시킨 좋은 사례가 될 것이다. 무엇보다 중세시대에 여성이 의료인으로 참여한다는 것은 어려운 상황이었음에도 (...) 여성 신비가이자 수녀원장으로서 영성치유와 자연치료의 선구자 역할을 했다고 생각된다. 그렇다면 힐데가르트는 자연치료사인가, 아니면 주술사인가. 이 글은 자연치료사로서 힐데가르트를 소개하는데 그 목표가 있다. 그 과정에서 중세 대체의학의 선구자로서 힐데가르트가 규정될 것이다. 그렇다면 대체의학을 우리는 어떻게 규정하고 있는가. 대체의학의 의미를 ①우리가 단순히 약물, 외과수술 또는 질환의 치료를 위해 정통적이며 의학적인 절차에 의존하지 않는다는 것, ②건강과 치유에 대한 접근을 지칭하기 위해 사용되는 것, ③인문학적 전통인 신과 연관된 의학이라는 의미로 인간의 심리적이며 영적 건강과 질병에 관심을 지니고 있다는 것에서 규정된다면, 힐데가르트의 자연치료법은 대체의학 범주에 포함 된다고 볼 수 있다. 왜냐하면 힐데가르트의 그것에서 치유란 하느님이 인간에게 준 본래의 힘을 회복하면 얻어질 수 있는 것으로 규정되기 때문이며, 그런 한에서 그녀의 자연치료법은 창조 신학과 우주 철학, 전인적 인간론과 심리학 등과 결부되어 있다고 할 수 있다. 다시 말해서 힐데가르트에게 치유란, 인간과 피조물 간에 연관성, 즉 인간의 영혼과 육체가 조화로운 일치를 추구함과 동시에 인간의 영혼과 육체가 자연현상과 상호 유기적인 연관성을 지니며 그리스도를 따르는 하나의 방식이라 할 수 있다. 그렇기 때문에 힐데가르트의 치유는 신학을 토대로 자연과 인간의 상호 유기적 연관성을 중요시하는 대체의학일 수 있으며, 또한 인간의 질병을 체액이론으로서 자연치료법과 연결시킨 영성치유의 사례라 할 수 있다. (shrink)