Monica H. Green Integrative Medicine Inc PDF

History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.
Blackwell
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History
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1478-0542
May
10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x
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Europe
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2009
2009Compass
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Integrative Author Journal
Medicine Ltd Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Integrative Medicine: Incorporating Medicine

and Health into the Canon of Medieval
European History
Monica H. Green*
Arizona State University
Abstract
Hitherto peripheral (if not outright ignored) in general medieval historiography,
medieval medical history is now a vibrant subdiscipline, one that is rightly
attracting more and more attention from ‘mainstream’ historians and other students
of cultural history. It does, however, have its particular characteristics, and under-
standing its source materials, methods, and analytical limitations may help those
not trained in the field better navigate, explore and potentially contribute to its
possibilities for illuminating the intersections of medicine and health with other
aspects of medieval culture. Although this article focuses primarily on western
Europe, many of its observations are also relevant to the Islamic world and
Byzantium precisely because all three cultures shared many of the same intellectual
traditions and social structures. The attached bibliography serves as a general
introduction to the current state of the field.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, studies surveying the general

landscape of medieval Europe continue to give short shrift – or ignore
outright – topics related to disease, health, and disability and the learned
and practical traditions of knowledge associated with them. For example,
in a survey of literacy and the impact the cultures of writing had on
medieval society, medicine does not merit even a passing reference,
despite its standing as one of three higher faculties in many universities.
Similarly, a general collection of essays on medieval culture has nothing
beyond a piece on the division of the corpse, a very minor element of
medieval understandings and practices of the body.1 Although one would
not expect the material and cultural concerns of medical history to make
much headway in traditionally framed projects like the New Cambridge
Medieval History (where not a single volume has a chapter devoted to
medicine or health aside from the oddly coupled ‘Plague and Family Life’
in the fourteenth-century volume), such resistance to incorporating medical
history is characteristic even of women’s and gender history, where
dedicated bibliographies have been published for over two decades.2 Even
© 2009 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Integrative Medicine 1219
when medical issues make themselves abundantly in evidence, their sig-

nificance is often overlooked. A dissertation submitted in 2005, surveying
the ‘political, social, and economic history’ of a mid-sized town in eastern
Spain, presented evidence for the prominence of physicians among the
top professions in the town yet never connected that finding with the
substantial historiography on medical practitioners, legislation, or learning
in Spain in this same period.3 Little wonder, then, that on the Internet
(which undergraduate students now often rely on as their only ‘library’),
medieval medicine’s presence is scant: leaving aside plague accounts,
among hundreds of primary sources in translation the Internet Medieval
Sourcebook currently includes only four documents relating to medicine or
health.4 One of the few exceptions to this neglect is the historiography
on Jews and Judaism (itself often marginalized), which exhibits more
inclusiveness because of the prominence of Jews in medical practice in the
later Middle Ages.5
The present article lays forth a challenge to fellow historians of medieval
culture to take medicine and the cultures of healthcare and body mainte-
nance as seriously as they do the history of politics, law, society, economics,
and religion. Although the infectious diseases of plague and leprosy have
not been underestimated by medieval historians for their potential impact
on demography and economics, there was much more to the medieval
landscape of health, disease, and the intellectual and social infrastructures
attending them than these two disease entities. Just as spices belong to the
history of medicine as much as to the history of food (and, according to
a recent account, global conquest),6 so hospitals and leprosaria belong to
the history of disease and notions of nutrition and nursing as well as
religious charity, economics, and poverty. Hagiographies and canonization
proceedings – among the most readily available edited texts for medieval
history thanks to the work of the Bollandists, and consequently the most
frequently mined by cultural and religious historians – are also an incredibly
rich source of evidence for the history of illness and disability, yet they
are only beginning to be explored for these purposes.7
Rather than treating disease and disability as so much ‘background
noise’ that needs to be filtered out when exploring themes in political,
religious, economic or cultural history, perhaps now is an opportune
moment to consider the ways in which pursuit of health may have itself
been a driving force in historical developments. The political importance
of medicine is suggested, for example, in a study mining the rich archives
of Valencia in eastern Spain, which argued that healthcare might have
been one of the services provided by a confraternity of free and enslaved
Black Africans in the fifteenth century, allowing them to forge some sense
of collective identity across their varied ethnic and linguistic back-
grounds.8 Similarly, it has been argued that health, illness, and other bodily
concerns might be worth exploring as a means to better understand relations
across the boundaries of faith.9 The burdens of illness or uncontrolled
© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x
1220 Integrative Medicine
fertility had profound economic as well as social consequences, and newer

researches suggest that we have perhaps been too limited in assuming that
people in the Middle Ages fatalistically resigned themselves to biology.10
Topics relating to medicine are appearing with more frequency in the
latest generation of finding aids for medieval studies,11 and there are other
signs that the field is flourishing as ever more junior researchers enter into
it. Nevertheless, for several reasons the field remains difficult to access.
Modern biomedicine has played an enormous role in making medicine’s
medieval past seem irrelevant. The advent of germ theory in the late
nineteenth century has, together with modern pharmaceutics and surgical
innovations, made all medical interventions of earlier periods seem stupid,
irrational, or downright barbaric. Whereas many aspects of Ayurvedic
or Chinese medicine are now being celebrated because they capture
‘traditional wisdom’, aside from a certain romantic fascination with
herbalism few are trying to revive medieval European theories of humors
or therapeutic practices. This general squeamishness and embarrassment about
medieval medicine (or myths about medieval medicine, since statements
about its nature are often not grounded in research) are compounded
by the state of the field itself. Even the best-trained medievalists have
difficulty finding the latest and best work or knowing what the controversies
in the field are and how to navigate these unknown shores. Definitive
treatments of certain subjects are often hidden away in not-so-obvious
locations: for example, a study of an incomplete mid-fifteenth-century
Middle English translation of Constantine the African’s minor work, the
De Coitu (On Sexual Intercourse), has the best study to date of the
circulation of all of Constantine’s Latin texts in medieval England.12 Basic
questions of chronology, terminology, and biography can be very hard for
the novice – or even the expert – to answer readily because there has been
too little investment in basic finding aids and synthetic studies or tools that
can bring widely dispersed data and phenomena into a form that can be
processed and used. Uncertainty over what constitutes a valid argument
in the field is such that even non-medievalists are taken as ‘authorities’
on certain questions of premodern medical history, in large part because
their simplified narratives are so easy to swallow.13
The present article has three strategic goals. First, I examine why the
field has been overwhelmingly characterized by studies of medical texts.
An older style of analysis treated such texts as intellectual abstractions with
little attachment to social context, let alone to real, sick bodies or the
persons who attended them. I argue that newer methodologies of analyzing
texts open up a much broader view of medical history, thus connecting
traditional philological endeavors to recover and deconstruct texts with
newer concerns to see how these texts connected to social realities. These
studies, in turn, have begun to connect fruitfully with other kinds of
historical work, particularly those based on local archival sources or other
cultural records, which form my second topic. Primarily drawing on legal
documents (civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical), archivally-based studies

open up new opportunities to catch medical practice ‘in the act’ and to
document what expectations non-specialists had of medical practitioners.
Finally, I describe several on-going trends and resources for future
research, both to alert readers of works soon coming their way and to
encourage them to strike out on their own in exploring new questions
in medieval medical history. Because there is so much new work in the
field, but also because so much of the most important work still appears
in article form rather than synthetic monographs, I limit myself to
describing major trends rather than systematically analyzing specific
arguments or theories. The Bibliography is therefore important in its own
right, since it is there that detailed studies and research tools (including
newer digital resources) will be found. This also includes some information
on texts available in English translation, as these are crucial aids to incor-
porating medicine into teaching and supervising undergraduate research.
My focus is primarily on western Europe. As will be apparent, however,
because Latin Christendom, Byzantium, Dar al-Islam, and European Jewish
communities shared many elements of medical theory and traditions of
practice, there is much that unites the structures of medicine (both intel-
lectually and socially) from Baghdad to Lisbon. Specific topics, such as
women’s medicine or the culture of bathing, have been thoroughly
surveyed in recent years and will not be addressed in depth here.14 For
reasons of space, I omit consideration of how our understandings of
disease itself (as opposed to the intellectual and social apparatuses of
medicine) are also changing, largely due to palaeopathological researches
that work at the borderlines of archaeology, physical anthropology, and now
genomics. In fact, I believe that it is artificial to force the physical and the
social, the biological and the cultural, into too strong an opposition. One
of the most important trends in the history of medieval medicine is the
growing dialogue between historians and other humanists who focus on
texts and documents, and bioarchaeologists and palaeomicrobiologists,
whose mutual interests in exploring the prevalence and effects of disease
on human populations has the potential to radically transform the kinds
of questions we are able to ask about the past.15
Reclamation: The Philological Project

The field of medieval medical history developed in the mid-nineteenth
century from a confluence of factors, one being the desire of European
physicians to connect their own histories to a trajectory that extended
back to classical Antiquity. Much like the history of medieval law, where
early work was driven by professional lawyers and where questions
resolved to histories of particular legal doctrines or biographies of particular
jurists, so in medicine many questions were narrowly framed around lists
of ‘firsts’ and celebrations of individual ideas or figures. I will not rehearse
a critique of this older style of medical history as a history of intellectual

elites and their books. I do wish to explain, however, why the field has
been – and will continue to be – heavily tilted toward philological studies
of texts. It is precisely the sterile mathematics of philological analysis
(‘Where on this stemma should this variant go? How much of a lacuna
exists here?’) that makes text-editing seem so distant from the historian’s
task of reconstructing the vibrant motives and actions of the living past. Yet
text-editing and the study of books is not simply necessary background
for the task of reconstructing medieval medical history, but can become
the very substance of that reconstruction. It is actually more resonant with
possibilities for medieval history than generally supposed.
The names of De Renzi, Daremberg, Rose, Sudhoff, Sigerist, Beccaria,
Kristeller, Thorndike, and Kibre will be familiar to anyone with a passing
acquaintance with medieval medical historiography. These were the great
editors or cataloguers of countless major and minor works in the field.
Ironically, the ‘philological project’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries produced very few truly critical editions of medical texts, that is,
texts edited from full and comprehensive collation of all known witnesses.
Not a single major text – not Avicenna’s Canon, not al-Majusi’s Kamil as-
Sina’a at-Tibbiyya (‘The Whole Art of Medicine’, either in Constantine
the African’s or Stephen of Antioch’s Latin translation), not Mondino’s
Anatomia, the list is interminable – has yet received a modern critical
edition. Obviously, the more popular the text, the more labor-intensive
the editorial work of collating multiple copies. Yet even for texts apparently
surviving in single copies, where the editorial demands are minimal, the
list of competently edited texts is frustratingly short.16
Having edited several medical texts myself (in Latin and Middle English),
I can well attest to the challenges any attempt at philological rigor (at least
in a Lachmannian sense) entails.17 The modus operandi adopted by myself
and several other recent editors has been to insist on being comprehensive
in surveying the extant witnesses, and then spot-collating every copy
enough to know whether (on structural grounds) one can identify certain
manuscript families. From this knowledge, an informed decision can be
made whether to privilege a few early manuscripts for full collation, or
select a ‘representative’ manuscript on other grounds, using the apparatus
to convey important historical information about the development of the
text. Texts edited according to these pragmatic principles will not satisfy
philological purists, but they can give a rich and nuanced historical
account of the genesis of texts and their medieval users. How? By also
taking ‘the whole book’ in evidence, examining every manuscript not
simply for textual variants but also ex libris marks, owner annotations,
compilation patterns, illustrations, or marginalia – any clue that might
hint at who made or used this particular physical document and why.
An example. As in law, the narrative of a ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’
dominates medical history, though in medicine (as in science) the ‘rebirth’
supposedly happened through the translation of works from the Arabic

(which in turn derived in large part from ancient Greek traditions) rather
than (as in law) the recovery of Latin texts. Scholars are now recognizing
more clearly that in medicine there was an ‘eleventh-century renaissance’
as well. It is characterized by efforts to reclaim the corpus of Latin medical
writings that had been fragmented and rendered corrupt by the early
medieval decline in scholarly standards and educational infrastructure. As
Florence Eliza Glaze has shown, the mid-eleventh-century philologist,
Gariopontus of Salerno, can be seen as the Gratian of medicine, for his
great accomplishment was, like Gratian’s in law, to take an assemblage of
materials that had already been available to Latin scholars and attempt to
impose order on it. Furthermore, by compiling a comprehensive list of all
the extant manuscripts of Gariopontus’s work, the Passionarius, dating and
localizing them, and then studying patterns of annotation and glossing,
Glaze has been able to show that it was this ‘native’ Latin work, and not
the new translations from the Arabic by Constantine the African, that lies
at the heart of new pedagogical practices in twelfth-century Salerno, then
the center of the new medical learning in southern Italy.18
Although not including any editions itself, philological analysis is
similarly at the core of the novel findings in Michael R. McVaugh’s recent
The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, a study of the development of and
textual interrelations between a group of learned Latin texts on surgery
written between the mid-thirteenth and early fourteenth century.19 In
working through how his five principal authors drew with increasing
confidence on their Arabic sources, McVaugh is able to discern subtle
shifts in emphasis over the course of the century. These, in turn, can be
connected to concrete changes in surgical practice, new methods in making
medicinal preparations, and even new aesthetic attitudes about what kind
of scarring was acceptable in surgical procedures and whether the surgeon
should rightfully be involved in cosmetic surgery. If anything, McVaugh
is too modest in articulating the novelty of his methods and his findings,
for this is in fact the most compelling work about the history of medieval
surgery that has ever been published.
Philological techniques of genealogical textual analysis remain the best
tool we have for studying texts and authors for whom we have virtually
no external corroborating evidence. Mireille Ausécache, for example, in
a preliminary assessment of the composition of the Liber iste, a treatise on
compound medicines coming out of mid-twelfth century Salerno, has
found intriguing subtle hints about the text’s author.20 These results might
seem minor, but when combined with the growing number of studies
on contemporaneous figures, the transformation in our understanding of
key historical transitions is potentially enormous. It was philological
analysis alone that allowed the separation of the hitherto conjoined twins,
the historical twelfth-century figure, Trota of Salerno, and the textual
persona ‘Trotula’ – a finding which in turn was pivotal in reconstructing the
processes by which medical knowledge was gendered in later medieval

Europe.21
Perhaps no development in medical philology has been more exciting,
however, than work on the phenomenon of vernacularization. Michael
McVaugh has argued that vernacularization had the effect of interrupting
the rationalizing agenda of the Latin surgical writers he studied. Whereas
each of them – working variously in northern Italy, southern France, and
Paris – knew of all his predecessors’ work and wrote in full awareness of
a continuing learned tradition in Latin, once these and other newly
composed works were rendered into the vernacular, that ‘international’
character of shared discourse and purpose evaporated into local traditions
that were less ‘dialogues’ than practical handbooks for empirically trained
practitioners who had few ambitions other than to ply their trade locally.
But there is also a flipside to this story. The phenomenon of vernacular-
ization encompassed texts of various genres and involved virtually all the
languages of western Europe. Since Latin didn’t in the least diminish in
its role in the universities, the expansion of medical literature into new
forms obviously signals the existence of new audiences. My own recent
work on the social functions of texts on women’s medicine between
c.1100 and 1600 – a corpus of over 150 texts – forced me to wrestle with
the motivations behind and uses of several dozen vernacular texts, nearly
all of which were direct translations from Latin sources. Who were these
translations made for? And how did they end up being used? I did indeed
find that the vernacular texts were reaching new audiences, but only in a
few cases were those audiences women. Although not as pronounced as
in Latin, there were still marked gendered differentials in medical literacy
in the vernacular, with women (both as practitioners and as patients)
lagging decidedly behind men in their engagements with medical books,
even those dedicated to women’s health.22 Rather, many of the new readers
were male surgeons who, though not participating in latinate university
culture (or if so, only marginally), were nevertheless able to establish surgery
as a respectable male profession because they could demonstrate their
participation in a broader culture of learning. (Studies by Lluís Cifuentes
and Erwin Huizenga – working on Catalan and Dutch, respectively – are
particularly important for showing how much social history of medicine
can be extracted from close analysis of vernacular surgical texts.23) Moreover,
I also found a considerable audience of lay male readers (lawyers, merchants,
aristocrats, and lesser gentry), who owned texts on women’s medicine
primarily because of their desire to understand the processes of generation.
One of the areas where the focus on vernacularization has had the most
revelatory results is new work on Hebrew medical literature. Medical texts
composed in Hebrew were quite rare prior to the twelfth century. At that
point, however, European Jews began to exploit Hebrew not simply as a
religious language but as a language for science and medicine. The Israeli
scholar Ron Barkaï published in 1998 the auto-bibliography of an
anonymous Jewish scholar working in southern France between 1197 and

1199 who, like Constantine the African a century before him in Italy,
labored single-handedly to render a whole corpus of texts into Hebrew.24
He was working, apparently, solely from the Latin, though Jewish scholars
in subsequent centuries would readily translate from both Latin and
Arabic and, increasingly, compose original texts in Hebrew. Tracing the
history of texts and the physical books that carried them is in fact one of
the most concrete ways to document intercultural contacts, especially for
periods when the documentation needed to reconstruct biographies and
intellectual settings is rare. Charles Burnett has argued, again through
close textual and philological analysis, that there were deliberate ‘research
programs’ that drove the translating work from Arabic to Latin both in
reconquered Toledo and the Crusader States.25 Although similar studies
on intercultural contact in the Muslim, Greek, Lombard, and Norman
context of southern Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries may be
pointing to the limits of easy acculturation, again it will be through textual
analysis (combined with scattered documentary evidence) that we will be able
to fill in that landscape.26
The history of books also forces us to consider the question of when
‘medieval’ medicine ends. Although modern bibliographic practices continue
to reinforce the separation of the ‘medieval’ from the ‘early modern’ (with
the result that early modernists rarely engage seriously with the scholarship
of their medievalist peers),27 one surprising benefit of analyzing the transition
from script to print is that we are gaining rich and important new know-
ledge about early modern medicine. Lacking modern critical editions of
the vast majority of medieval medical texts, scholars are still compelled to
work with editions produced by enterprising publishers in the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries, when many medieval texts still had relevance
to contemporary practitioners. Florence Eliza Glaze has been able to make
important contributions to the history of Galenism by documenting the
ways in which Gariopontus’s eleventh-century text, because of its alleged
connections to Galen, was given new life in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, first by reusing old manuscripts and then by making printed
editions.28 Similarly, because I happened to be reading systematically across
the medieval/early modern divide, I have been able to document that the
single most popular text on midwifery in Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (written in German, it was translated into Czech,
Danish, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish) was not a
novel Renaissance composition but instead reflected the obstetrical practices
and beliefs of late medieval Italy.29
‘Old-fashioned’ philological work will necessarily continue in the field
of medieval medical history for the simple reason that there is no substitute
for this painstaking work of reconstructing a text’s history, and texts are
the most important element in this (as in any) branch of intellectual
history. But it is the history of books – their materiality as well as their
abstract contents – that is producing the most important results for the
equally important social and cultural histories of medicine. Such work is
being notably transformed by the digitization of both manuscript catalogues
and manuscripts themselves which allows a new level of comprehensiveness.30
An excellent example is the recent publication on the Internet of perhaps
the largest medieval manuscript ever produced, the so-called Codex Gigas
(‘Giant Book’), an 890 mm tall by 490 mm wide behemoth that weighs
in at 75 kg and contains, among other things, several of the most-widely
circulating medical texts in medieval Europe.31 It is easy now to identify what
those texts are, when they were composed, and how widely they circulated.
But it is still a challenge to answer the equally valid question: what are
these medical texts doing here, amid a Bible and various historical texts in
a book so big it takes two people to move it? Because philological work
is now being put towards the aims of social history, it is becoming possible
to move away from narratives of intellectual history that treat texts and
their readers as abstract ideals and begin to think concretely of a world of
medical thought and practice connected inextricably to the worlds of politics,
economics, religion and culture that other historians take as their province.
Medicine in the Archives

In 1984, Charles Donahue critiqued his fellow legal historians for looking
primarily at academic jurisprudence rather than the history of legal practice.32
Just as legal historians have taken up Donahue’s challenge to study actual
legal cases rather than theoretical treatises only, so medical historians have
increasingly turned to archives for ‘documents of practice’ to help them
ground their understanding of medical ideas in concrete testimony.33
Here, however, the comparison with law shows how difficult the field of
medical history is, for unlike law there is no such thing as a ‘medical
archive’. Aside from hospital or leprosaria records (which overwhelmingly
document their charitable aspects or donation rolls rather than the amount
or quality of the medical care they provided, let alone the diagnostic
rationales that might have driven such care) and the great national or
municipal libraries that gather large numbers of manuscripts from university
medical faculties, there are no repositories that uniquely hold documents
related to medical matters. Rather, such records – contracts for care drawn
up between individual patients and practitioners, medical certificates con-
firming slaves’ health, civil and criminal court records involving medical
testimony or disputes over care – are scattered randomly amid hundreds
of thousands of extant archival documents. Finding materials specifically
related to medicine is therefore a matter of sheer serendipity. Medical
historians must become, or ally themselves with, archival and other histo-
rians who are positioned to discover and interpret such documents.
Pursuing the social history of medicine from archival sources brings to
the fore important differences between what we can learn about the early
Middle Ages and the high and later periods. Whereas the history of
medieval medicine as a narrative of texts and the ideas embedded in them
– the philological enterprise – can be pursued in essentially the same
fashion for both the early and high medieval periods since the technology
of the manuscript codex remained the same, the social history of medicine
is very difficult to pursue for the early Middle Ages since medicine was
then barely professionalized and left few traces aside from chance references
in chronicles or hagiographies. Even when we find medical practitioners,
it is often because they happen to be included in a contract; their medical
identity is usually irrelevant to the event being documented (though it
may say something about their stature in their community).34 Civil, criminal,
and canon (church) law courts all grew exponentially from the twelfth or
thirteenth century on. That increase in the legal infrastructure radically
increased the sheer amount of legal records, so that the availability of
materials is more a function of post-medieval accidents of survival than an
original poverty of written documentation. But legal developments also
had a secondary effect on medicine, for the law helped validate (and maybe
even drive) the development of medical professionalism with new legal
expectations of medical expertise.35
Legal records are, first and foremost, the foundation for much of our
proposographical data on medieval practitioners. Still the unparalleled
standard is Ernst Wickersheimer’s Dictionnaire biographique des médecins en
France au Moyen Age. First published in 1936, it collects quick biographical data
on several thousand French medical practitioners from the sixth to the end of
the fifteenth centuries. The Dictionnaire was reprinted in 1980 by Danielle
Jacquart, who, in an early use of computerization, made various quantitative
analyses of the data to paint a rich picture of the development of the medical
profession in France.36 Although a similar project was done for English
practitioners in 1965 (with a supplement in 1990),37 it is French archives that
have been repeatedly mined for small localized studies of medical practitioners,
some of which move beyond prosopography toward real collective social
histories of practitioners, looking at their wealth, marriage patterns, etc.38
It would certainly be worthwhile if more comprehensive publication of
documents were done following the model of Joseph Shatzmiller’s 1989
collection of contracts, trial records, and other materials from the moder-
ately sized Provençal town of Manosque for the years 1262–1348, or the
collection of records related to medical licensing from later medieval
Valencia published by Luis García-Ballester and colleagues in the same
year.39 Simple transcription and description of such archival documents is,
of course, of value in itself, but as with the transformative move from
philology to cultural studies of the book, so the painstaking work of
‘connecting the dots’ between archival records and other sources is what
produces real payoffs in creating rich historical accounts of medieval medical
thought and practice. An excellent example of what can be extracted from
archival sources is Jean-Pierre Bénézet’s 1999 study of pharmacy in late
medieval Mediterranean Europe.40 Bénézet, a practicing pharmacist himself,

gathered data from the account books or inventories of several pharmacists
in Spain, France, and Italy (especially one particularly valuable record from
a pharmacist in Arles, who linked patient names with their purchases).
Analyzing as well the texts he knew they owned, he was able to recreate
a rich material world of books, weights, measures, spices, syrups and the
patients who patronized these practitioners. Even if Bénézet’s statistical
analyses suggest greater precision than the documentation can reasonably bear,
his evidence shows the remarkable ways common notions of ‘profession’ could
be develop even among men with no common networks of education.
Surely the most important study using archival data to link the intel-
lectual life of medical practitioners with the actual circumstances of their
practice is Michael R. McVaugh’s 1993 study of the medicalization of late
thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Catalonian society. McVaugh’s
work on medicine in the Crown of Aragón may, ironically, be able to
paint such a rich picture of medieval medical life precisely because there
was no well-established university in the region. Consider the difference
between his work and Nancy Siraisi’s 1981 study of a contemporary circle
of medical teachers, writers, and practitioners in Bologna, which remains
one of the foundational books in the field.41 For this definitive study of
the Bolognese medical professor Taddeo Alderotti and the students who
surrounded him, Siraisi read exhaustively through these physicians’ writings
and constructed persuasive biographies of them, both social and intellectual.
But what did the larger ‘medical infrastructure’ of high medieval Bologna
look like? We know that Alderotti and his students (not unexpectedly)
enjoyed the patronage of Bolognese elite and served certain functions in
providing medical opinion on municipal matters of concern to that same
elite. But the Bolognese archives are among the richest collections still
extant, replete with documents that touch on medical concerns.42 One
wonders what we might learn further about Taddeo’s and his students
theoretical concerns if we could place them more concretely not just in
the intellectual world of those they considered their peers – poets, noblemen,
and jurists – but also alongside the midwives, empirics, and pharmacists
and the spectrum of patients who sought out their services. McVaugh’s
study gets us closer to answering at least some of the latter questions. For
over a decade, McVaugh worked collaboratively with the late Luis García-
Ballester,43 scouring every archive in Catalonia to which they could gain
access, looking for any document that mentioned medical practitioners or
medical care: from inventories of surgeons’ books to royal letters to a
notarial account of the examination of a hermaphrodite. Even though
eastern Spain produced no major medical faculty in this period (most
ambitious physicians continued to travel to Montpellier for their train-
ing), the populace in the Crown of Aragon enjoyed a surprisingly high
practitioner-to-patient ratio and was clearly demanding in expecting access
to learned medical care. Indeed, McVaugh argues that certain aspects of the
professionalization process, such as licensing and the creation of municipal

posts for physicians and surgeons, arose out of popular demand rather than
the machinations of aspiring practitioners themselves. Similarly rich archival
work on Spanish records has continued; currently it is probably the best
understood region in terms of the social history of medicine.44
Perhaps the largest bodies of extant medieval records have to do with
church affairs. Beyond Bibles and Books of Hours, preacher’s manuals and
theological tracts, there are untold numbers of records of ecclesiastical
institutions (monasteries, cathedrals, hospitals, and leprosaria), canonization
proceedings, and church court records. All these latter three categories of
documents are, like the secular documents used by McVaugh and others,
legal records and therefore need to be studied in full awareness of their
procedural genesis and uses. Despite the oft-repeated canard about clergy
being forbidden to practice medicine and common assumptions that
Christian valorization of Christ-like suffering encouraged meek submission
to pain and illness, the intersections of medical history and religious history
are among the most active areas of innovative research. Dominican preachers
were involved in delivering healthcare long after Lateran IV supposedly
forbade clerical practice in 1215; cloistered religious were some of the most
regular participants in prophylactic bloodletting; hospitals, though rarely
‘medical’ institutions in the dedicated way we think of them now, certainly
participated in the provision of healthcare by providing basic regimens
of nourishment and even music.45 Religion could also be a factor in
medicine, in that it could define the limits of what kinds of medical
interventions were acceptable (for example, the use of lard or non-kosher
wine in remedies for Jewish patients) or where the limits of patient trust
might lie, as we see in the remarkable malpractice trial of a Jewish midwife
in Marseille in the early fifteenth century.46 Drawing distinctions between
medicine and religion is actually rather tricky business. Where was the
line between medical cure and miraculous cure? Between a ‘scientific’
faith in the properties of herbs or charms and superstition?47 Understanding
the interplay between religion and politics even turns out to be crucially
important for unpacking the embedded meanings in images, for as Eliza-
beth L’Estrange has shown, whole representational programs in Books of
Hours and other works, although seemingly depicting childbirth scenes of
simple piety, can be intimately linked to larger dynastic concerns.48
Recognizing the artificiality of divisions between ‘religion’, ‘politics’,
and ‘culture’ is the key innovation of Katharine Park’s 2006 study of the
development of dissection practices in northern Italy between the late
thirteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Although not based extensively on
archival research, Park demonstrates powerfully the virtues of grounding
historical analysis in deeply localized study, one that examines medical
culture from a variety of angles. Park shows that anatomical practices were
not limited to learned physicians. Rather, there were a variety of motives
for opening the human body, only some of them specifically medical. Park
moves gracefully and persuasively across evidence from canonization

proceedings, popular literature, church art work, manuscript illumination
and printed woodcuts – testing and contextualizing the evidence found
in anatomical texts. Importantly, just as a gender analysis helped me to
move beyond the privileged perspective of university medicine out onto
the edges of literacy, so Park realized that the drive to open and understand
the female body was at the heart of the transformation in anatomical
practices in late medieval and early Renaissance northern Italy.
As with the philological project, the best archival and cultural work in
the history of medicine aims for exhaustive analysis. For those in a position
to do so, the study of whole archives is clearly the most fruitful method,
since it can show the exact ways in which medical concerns were inter-
woven into the social fabric. Shona Kelly Wray’s recent prosopographical
study of the evidence from over three thousand Bolognese wills and
notarial contracts at the time of the Black Death shows that the social
bonds (and the legal procedures documenting them) held firm despite a
mortality of perhaps forty per cent of the population.49 Just as Wray is
able to challenge the characterization of social chaos that has long been
accepted from such literary sources as Boccaccio, so other medical histo-
rians are able to challenge ‘truisms’ about medieval medicine – that, for
example, the Black Death uniformly discredited medical learning or that
medieval women’s health was uniquely women’s business – by systemati-
cally and comprehensively weighing the evidence of a variety of sources
rather than relying on random anecdotes. Archival sources have their own
limitations, to be sure, chief among them the challenges of documenting
those individuals or events that fell outside the purview of legal oversight.50
But that is no different from other fields of history. And that, in the end,
is an argument for why the findings of these new comprehensive histories
should be taken seriously by other historians. Even if a historian is not
immediately interested in apothecaries in the south of France, surgeons in
Spain, midwives in England, or sick people in any of these areas, it is
relevant to all historians that certain patterns of literacy, gender structures,
economics, inheritance patterns and legal procedures are being docu-
mented by these studies. And given that most of these aspects of medical
culture and practice have transregional (and in some cases ‘international’)
manifestations, they merit the attention of medieval historians at large.
The Future of the History of Medieval Medicine

In modern clinical biomedicine, the term ‘integrative medicine’ is used
to describe medical practices that allow the addition of non-western or
spiritual practices (e.g., acupuncture or meditation) into the parameters of
care based on western biomedicine with its firm notions of physical cau-
sation of disease. The best work in medieval medical history is likewise
‘integrative’ in moving beyond the limits of any one type of document or
methodology, and in recognizing the ways in which medicine in particular

allowed for a fluidity of ideas and practices across cultural boundaries. It
is highly unlikely that western Europe will witness any transformative new
discoveries in medieval medicine as happened in the field of Chinese
medical history with the discovery in 1900 of a cache in the Silk Road
town of Dunhuang, where seventy-four medical manuscripts were found,
many containing previously unknown texts. Nor is it likely that anything
like the Genizah discoveries in Egypt will be duplicated, which are con-
tinuing to flesh out our understandings of medical commerce and learning
in the eastern Mediterranean.51 European medieval medicine is already
better served in terms of the accessibility of editions than the much richer
tradition of medical writing in the medieval Islamic world where,
although important inventories have been available since the 1970s, phil-
ological work is still haphazard and social history rare.52 The history of
medieval European medicine is therefore not an immature field. Unlike
the field of canon law, however, there is no Institute of Medieval Medical
History; with only a few impermanent exceptions, the history of medieval
medicine has enjoyed no strong institutional support on either side of the
Atlantic. Whereas canon law has had since 1937 a comprehensive list of
manuscripts dating from that critical turn c.1100, a comparable list of late
eleventh- and twelfth-century manuscripts of medicine is only being
compiled right now.53 The medievalist Gundolf Keil was head of the
Würzburg Institute for the History of Medicine for many years, but while
the Swiss scholar Henry Sigerist contributed importantly to early medi-
eval medicine in the 1930s, his interests turned primarily to post-medieval
topics during his American sojourn at the Johns Hopkins University and
no medieval medical historian has been on the staff at Hopkins since then.
In Britain, the Wellcome Trust (founded on the estate of the childless
American pharmaceutical entrepreneur, Sir Henry Wellcome, 1853–1936)
has made enormous investments in every aspect of medical history over
the past fifty years, virtually single-handedly transforming the character of
the world of Anglophone scholarship. Nevertheless, although there are
several prolific British scholars of medieval medical history (particularly
Peregrine Horden, Carole Rawcliffe, and Peter Jones, with an increasingly
large cohort of junior scholars following in their footsteps), there has as
yet coalesced no ‘British school’ in medieval medical historiography.
Rather, it is still philologists who are sustaining research programs.
Linguists, of course, have reason to be interested in medical texts: they
offer an unparalleled mine of terminology poorly represented by most of
the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century lexicographical projects,
which were based almost exclusively on literary texts.54 The on-going
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, for example, is incorporating lemmata from the
many editions of medical texts made over the course of the past twenty
years by Tony Hunt.55 The Spanish classical philologist, Enrique Montero
Cartelle, has assembled a whole équipe of scholars at the Universidad de
Valladolid who are working on various editing projects under the

umbrella title, Speculum medicinae. Montero Cartelle himself has built up a
long list of definitive editions of medical texts, mostly on aspects of
fertility and andrology. Collectively, the équipe is working on a Diccionario
Latino de Ginecología y Andrología, a Dictionary of Latin Gynecological and
Andrological Texts from Antiquity to the Renaissance.56 Once completed,
the field will have a dynamic reference source that can show the changing
valences of medical terminology over the course of the medieval millen-
nium. Similarly, groups of linguists at the Universidad de Las Palmas de
Gran Canaria and in Finland are engaged in systematic studies of medical
terminology and grammar in Middle English.
Perhaps the single most energetic figure in promoting medieval medical
history (in all its permutations) today is Agostino Paravicini-Bagliani,
emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Lausanne. In
addition to his own important monograph on medicine at the papal courts,
since 1993 Paravicini-Bagliani has been publishing the annual journal
Micrologus: Natura, scienze e società medievali/Nature, Sciences and Medieval
Societies, which has devoted many of its issues to topics on medicine and
the history of the body.57 The Variorum reprints series, published by
Ashgate Publishers, has been consistently reprinting the major studies
(now with indices) of historians of medieval medicine such as Jerry Stannard,
Vern Bullough, Danielle Jacquart, Luis García-Ballester, and Peregrine
Horden. Precisely because there is still no single locus where even the
most stalwart researcher can find all the bibliographic information he or
she needs in this field, I recently started up a listserv (electronic bulletin
board) on the topic of medieval medical history, to allow researchers at all
levels to communicate quickly with each other. As of this writing, the list
has over 200 subscribers from fifteen different countries.58
Doing medieval medical history is both easier and more arduous now
than it was thirty years ago. It is easier because the quality of work in the
field is consistently rising, and because path-breaking scholars are pursuing
comprehensive analyses that can push us beyond the frustrating anonymity
and randomness of many of our sources, allowing the creation of both ‘thick
descriptions’ of particular events or phenomena and larger narratives that
trace out overarching trends. Work in the field is also more arduous,
however, because so much scholarship is still published in small, often
scattered studies, making it difficult to keep abreast of new findings or
even to determine what work is relevant to a given question. Collecting
materials from widely dispersed libraries is slow and often expensive
business, and interpreting them demands labored analysis that no computer
can ease; the Trotula texts, for example, are extant in close to 200 different
copies, found in ninety different libraries throughout Europe and North
America. Still, the appetite for this work is growing. Scholars engaged in
cultural studies in particular have become eager to exploit aspects of
medical history as they pursue topics related to the body, yet many studies
suffer from a superficial grasp of medical theory and discursive habits.

Aside from such notable exceptions of Mary Wack’s philologically rigorous
study of the disease of lovesickness and Jeremy Citrome’s intriguing study
of the use of surgical metaphors in England as an instrument of ecclesias-
tical power,59 most non-specialists piece their understanding of medieval
medicine together from dated textbooks or broad surveys, or from ‘medieval
secondary sources’, that is, the encyclopedias of natural knowledge com-
piled by the likes of Bartholomew the Englishman, Vincent of Beauvais,
and Thomas of Cantimpré. The sophistication of these encyclopedists’
engagement with medieval medicine (and the breadth of their reading) is
becoming clear in on-going projects, and there is no denying the tremen-
dous influence these synthetic works must have had in informing the
worldview of preachers throughout northern Europe.60 Nevertheless, it is
shocking to see easy depictions of medieval understandings of the humors
or anatomy based on not a single direct reading of texts of medical theory
or praxis. Perhaps the most powerful finding coming out of archival
studies and canonization records is the investment that average medieval
people made in the physiological and therapeutic concepts we find articu-
lated in medical texts. From the advance contracts signed by town citizens
to receive medical care, to complaints not for bad treatment but for
insufficient treatment, to narratives of ever escalating medical consultations
prior to saintly intervention, medieval records are full of evidence that
medieval therapies and the practitioners who offered them were taken
seriously by the populace at large. As historians, we can do no less than
take medieval medicine as seriously as medieval people did themselves.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to the following for providing information that contributed to
the development of this article: Klaus-Dietrich Fischer, Florence Eliza
Glaze, Michael R. McVaugh, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Clare Pilsworth,
and Michael Stolberg.
Short Biography
Monica H. Green is Professor of History at Arizona State University
where she holds affiliate appointments in Women’s and Gender Studies,
and the Program in Social Science and Health in the School of Human
Evolution and Social Change. She teaches courses in Women’s Health,
Medieval History, and the History of Science and Medicine. She has
published extensively on various aspects of the history of women’s medicine
in premodern Europe, including Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West:
Texts and Contexts (Ashgate, 2000), which was co-winner of the 2004
John Nicholas Brown Prize for the best first book in medieval studies;
The ‘Trotula’: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (University of
Pennsylvania, 2001); and Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of

Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynecology (Oxford, 2008). Her recent articles
have appeared in such journals as The Lancet, Gender and History, and
Medical History. She is now undertaking a general study of the medical
school of Salerno in the twelfth century. Green has served on the councils
of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship, the American Association
for the History of Medicine, and the Medieval Academy of America.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Professor of History, Arizona State University, Box 874302, Tempe,
AZ 85287- 4302, USA. Email: monica.green@asu.edu.
1
C. F. Briggs, ‘Literacy, Reading, and Writing in the Medieval West’, Journal of Medieval History,
26 (2001): 397–420; P. Linehan and J. Nelson (eds), The Medieval World (New York, NY:
Routledge, 2001).
2
C. Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Plague and Family Life’, in M. Jones (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval
History, Vol. 6, c.1300–c.1415 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). D. Elliott, ‘The
Three Ages of Joan Scott’, American Historical Review, 113 (2008): 1390– 403, makes only
passing reference to works on anatomy and sexual difference in her review of the state of
medieval women’s and gender history, even though Scott, writing in the same issue, stresses the
necessity of interrogating the historical category of ‘women’ which would presumably include
all issues of biological existence.
3
J. Paul, ‘The Catalan city of Manresa in the 14th and 15th Centuries: A Political, Social, and
Economic History’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Toronto, 2005).
4
As of July 20, 2008, http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/Sbook.html, I found the following: the
section on Islam includes one excerpt from the eleventh-century Persian physician Avicenna;
the section Intellectual Life has the course of instruction on medicine at the University of Paris
in 1270–74, and a link to an Italian translation of a Salernitan treatise on diets; and in the
section on Sex and Gender, there is Margery Kempe’s (c.1373–after 1438) description of the
birth of her first child. Neither the link for the ‘Rule of the Lady Hospitallers of the Royal
Monastery of Sigena, 1188’ nor that for the trial of Jacoba Felicie (Paris, 1322) were any longer
active.
5
See, for example, C. Cluse (ed.), The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth
Centuries). Proceedings of the International Symposium Held at Speyer, 20–25 October 2002 (Turn-
hout: Brepols, 2004).
6
P. H. Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2008).
7
For example, Ronald Finucane, The Rescue of the Innocents: Endangered Children in Medieval
Miracles (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); I. Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe:
Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100 –c.1400, Routledge Studies in Medieval
Religion & Culture (London: Routledge, 2006); Brenda S. Gardenour, ‘Medicine and Miracle:
The Reception of Theory-Rich Medicine in the Hagiography of the Latin West, 13th–14th
Centuries’, Ph.D. diss. (Boston University, 2008).
8
D. Blumenthal, ‘ “La Casa dels Negres”: Black African Solidarity in Late Medieval Valencia’,
in T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (eds), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2005), 225– 46.
9
M. H. Green, ‘Conversing with the Minority: Relations among Christian, Jewish, and
Muslim Women in the High Middle Ages’, Editor’s Preface to a special issue of Journal of
Medieval History, 34 (2008): 105–18.
10
P. Biller, The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000); M. H. Green, ‘Gendering the History of Women’s Healthcare’, Gender and History,
Twentieth Anniversary Special Issue, 20/3 (November 2008): 487–518.

11
For example, W. C. Jordan (editor-in-chief), Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Supplement I (New
York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004); M. Schaus (ed.), Women and Gender in Medieval
Europe: An Encyclopedia (New York, NY: Routledge, 2006); W. F. Bynum and H. Bynum (eds),
Dictionary of Medical Biography, 5 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2006); R. Bjork (ed.), Oxford
Dictionary of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
12
L. Matheson, ‘Constantinus Africanus: Liber de coitu (Liber creatoris)’, in M. T. Tavormina (ed.),
Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52,
Its Texts, Language, and Scribe, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 292, 2 vols. (Tempe,
AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 1:287–326. Similarly, some
of the best overviews of such central topics of medieval medical theory and therapeutics as
bloodletting are found in the introductions to editions of otherwise minor texts; this is especially
true of the Arnau de Vilanova series. See the section on critical editions in the Bibliography
below.
13
For example, for critiques of the influence of Thomas Laqueur’s notion of a ‘one-sex body’
dominating all premodern thinking on the nature of sex and gender differences, see the
critiques of M. H. Green, ‘Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval
Women’s Medicine’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd ser., 2 (2005): 1– 46; H.
King, ‘The Mathematics of Sex: One to Two, or Two to One?’, Studies in Medieval and
Renaissance History, 3rd ser., 2 (2005): 47–56.
14
See ‘Essay Reviews’ in the Bibliography below. An important new item on women’s medical
practices is M. Cabré, ‘Women or Healers? Household Practices and the Categories of Health
Care in Late Medieval Iberia’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 82 (2008): 18–51.
15
The best examples of such fruitful dialogue are L. K. Little (ed.), Plague and the End of
Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); V. Nutton
(ed.), Pestilential Complexities: Understanding Medieval Plague, Medical History Supplements 27 (2008),
available for free download at http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/tocrender.fcgi?iid=176582.
A Summer Seminar in 2009 on ‘Disease in the Middle Ages’, sponsored by the National
Endowment for the Humanities and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies,
presses these connections further; see http://medievalseminar2009.asu.edu for details.
16
See the Bibliography below for a selective list of recently edited texts.
17
The German philologist Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) was not the originator though he has
come to be the eponymous focal point of the ‘classical’ methods of text-editing mentioned
above. His belief that the Urtext of historical authors could be reconstructed is challenged by a
newer school of philology that sees every manuscript copy as a unique cultural product, texts
being inherently unstable as they are always subject to change.
18
Glaze’s edition of Gariopontus is in progress. For preliminary findings, see F. E. Glaze,
‘Gariopontus and the Salernitans: Textual Traditions in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in
D. Jacquart and A. Paravicini Bagliani (eds), La ‘Collectio Salernitana’ di Salvatore De Renzi
(Florence: SISMEL/Galluzzo, 2008), 149–90.
19
M. R. McVaugh, The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, Micrologus’ Library, 15 (Florence:
SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006).
20
M. Ausécache, ‘Un Liber iste, des Liber iste? Un Platearius, des Platearius? État des lieux d’un
projet d’édition’, in D. Jacquart and A. Paravicini Bagliani (eds), La Scuola medica Salernitana:
Gli autori e i testi, Edizione Nazionale ‘La Scuola medica Salernitana’, 1 (Florence: SISMEL/
Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007), 1–30.
21
M. H. Green, ‘Reconstructing the Oeuvre of Trota of Salerno’, in Jacquart and Bagliani (eds),
La Scuola medica Salernitana, 183–233.
22
M. H. Green, Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern
Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For a detailed example of how I have
reconstructed reading audiences through philological analysis, see M. H. Green and L. R.
Mooney, ‘The Sickness of Women’, in M. T. Tavormina (ed.), Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval
Medical Compendium: Trinity College Cambridge MS R.14.52, Its Texts, Language, and Scribe,
Medieval & Renaissance Texts and Studies, 292, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 2:455–568.
23
L. Cifuentes, ‘Université et vernacularisation au bas moyen âge: Montpellier et les traducteurs
catalanes médiévales de traités de médecine’, in D. Le Blévec and Th. Granier (eds), L’Université

de Médecine de Montpellier et son rayonnement (XIIIe–XVe siècles): actes du colloque international de

Montpelllier organisé par le Centre de recherches et d’études médiévales sur la Méditerranée occidentale
(Université Paul Valéry-Montpellier III), 17–19 mai 2001 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 273–90; E.
Huizenga, ‘Unintended Signatures: Middle Dutch Translators of Surgical Works’, in M. Goyens,
P. De Leemans, and A. Smets (eds), Science Translated: Latin and Vernacular Translations of Scientific
Treatises in Medieval Europe (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008), 415– 48.
24
R. Barkaï, A History of Jewish Gynaecological Texts in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1998),
2 0 – 8.
25
C. Burnett, ‘The Coherence of the Arabic-Latin Translation Programme in Toledo in the
Twelfth Century’, Science in Context, 14 (2001): 249–88; Burnett, ‘Stephen, the Disciple of
Philosophy, and the Exchange of Medical Learning in Antioch’, Crusades, 5 (2006): 113–29.
See also E. Savage-Smith, ‘Between Reader and Text: Some Medieval Arabic Marginalia’, in D.
Jacquart and C. Burnett (eds), Scientia in margine. Études sur les marginalia dans les manuscrits
scientifiques du Moyen Age à la Renaissance, Hautes Études médiévales et modernes, 88 (Geneva:
Librairie Droz, 2005), 75–101; Savage-Smith, ‘New Evidence for the Frankish Study of Arabic
Medical Texts in the Crusader Period’, Crusades, 5 (2006): 99–112.
26
For example, P. E. Pormann, The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina’s ‘Pragmateia’, Studies in
Ancient Medicine, 29 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), who edits a bilingual copy of Paul in Arabic and
Greek produced in Sicily in the twelfth century; A. M. Ieraci Bio, ‘Testi ginecologici tra
Oriente ed Occidente. 1. Metrodora ed il Dynameron di Nicola Mirepso. 2. Una testimonianza
italo-greca su una Quaestio medicalis salernitana’, in Jacquart and Bagliani (eds), La Scuola medica
Salernitana, 283–314.
27
The standard bibliographical database in the United States, Historical Abstracts (published by
the American Historical Association), begins its coverage at 1450, thus relegating virtually all
scholarship on the medieval period invisible. Many early modernists begin their studies from
the inception of print, leaving all earlier manuscript texts unstudied. A rare but important
example of a collection on the early modern period that begins with the late Middle Ages is
M. S. R. Jenner and P. Wallis (eds), Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c.1450–
c.1850 (Basingstoke/New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
28
F. E. Glaze, ‘Galen Refashioned: Gariopontus of Salerno’s Passionarius in the Later Middle
Ages and Renaissance’, in E. Lane Furdell (ed.), Textual Healing: Essays in Medieval and Early
Modern Medicine (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 53–77.
29
M. H. Green, ‘The Sources of Eucharius Rösslin’s Rosegarden for Pregnant Women and Midwives
(1513)’, Medical History, 53/2 (Spring 2009): 167–92, available gratis on PubMed Central at
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/tocrender.fcgi?iid=178168.
30
For example, the Schoenberg Database allows the incorporation of data on manuscripts that
are (or have recently been) in private hands, which hitherto were almost entirely out of
scholarly purview. See ‘Digital Resources’ in the Bibliography below.
31
Stockholm, National Library of Sweden, MS A 148 (Codex Gigas), s. xiii in. (Bohemia). A
full description and digital reproduction can be found at Codex Gigas, http://www.kb.se/codex-
gigas/eng/, accessed July 20, 2008. The medical texts are: the Articella, a collection of five basic
texts on medical theory; Constantine the African (d. ante 1098/99), Pantegni, Practica, Bks I and
II; Constantine, Liber graduum; and Constantine, Liber de oculis. The information provided on
the website does not take into account the best recent work in the field of medical history,
unfortunately.
32
C. Donahue, Jr., Why the History of Canon Law Is Not Written, Selden Lecture, July 3, 1984
(London: Selden Society, 1986).
33
Even theoretical legal questions relating to medicine have yet to be thoroughly explored. Two
important recent studies are M. Elsakkers, ‘Her anda neylar: An Intriguing Criterion for
Abortion in Old Frisian Law’, Scientiarum Historia: Tijdschrift voor de geschiedenis van de weten-
schappen en de geneeskunde/Revue pour l’histoire des sciences et de la medicine, 30 (2004): 107–54; O.
Cavallar, ‘Septimo mense. Periti medici e partorienti in Baldo degli Ubaldi’, in C. Frova, M. G.
Nico Ottaviani, and S. Zucchini (eds), VI centenario della morte di Baldo degli Ubaldi, 1400–2000
(Perugia: Università degli studi, 2005), 365– 460.
34
C. Pilsworth, ‘Could You Just Sign This for Me John? Doctors, Charters and Occupational
Identity in Early Medieval Northern and Central Italy’, Social History of Medicine (forthcoming).

Documentary references to medical practitioners in contexts that have nothing to do with their
medical practice will, of course, also occur in later medieval records (see, for example, the
evidence culled randomly from English writs in S. Jenks, ‘Medizinische Fachkräfte in England
zur Zeit Heinrichs VI (1428/29–1460/61)’, Sudhoffs Archiv, 69/2 [1985]: 214–27). But such
citations themselves show that medicine offered professional social identities in the high Middle
Ages in a way not found in the earlier period (at least, that is, for men).
35
A comprehensive study of the interactions of law and medicine is badly needed. The Italian
scholar Alessandro Simili seems to have had his Storia della medicina legale nearly ready for
publication at the time of his death in 1977; unfortunately it has never appeared. The practice
of medical licensing is especially ripe for cross-cultural analysis, since it appears that practices
in the Islamic world may have had effects in Christian Europe. See L. C. Chiarelli, ‘A Prelim-
inary Study on the Origins of Medical Licensing in the Medieval Mediterranean’, Al-Masaq:
Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean, 10 (1998): 1–11; S. B. Edgington, ‘Medicine and Surgery
in the “Livre des Assises de la Cour des Bourgeois de Jérusalem” ’, Al-Masaq: Islam and the
Medieval Mediterranean, 17 (2005): 87–97.
36
D. Jacquart, Le milieu médical en France du XIIe au XVe siècle: En annexe 2e supplément au
‘Dictionnaire’ d’Ernest Wickersheimer (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1981).
37
C. H. Talbot and E. A. Hammond, The Medical Practitioners in Medieval England: A Biographical
Register (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1965); F. M. Getz, ‘Medical Practitioners
in Medieval England’, Social History of Medicine, 3 (1990): 245–83. The work of R. S. Gottfried,
including Doctors and Medicine in Medieval England, 1340 –1530 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1986), that claimed to present quantitative data on English practitioners, has
been discredited.
38
For example, C. Giraudet, ‘Le milieu médical à Decize à la fin du Moyen Âge’, Annales de
Bourgogne, 72 (2000): 237– 64.
39
J. Shatzmiller, Médecine et justice en Provence médiévale: Documents de Manosque, 1262–1348
(Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1989); L. García-Ballester, M. R.
McVaugh, and A. Rubio-Vela (eds), Medical Licensing and Learning in Fourteenth-Century Valencia,
Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 79, pt. 6 (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical
Society, 1989).
40
J.-P. Bénézet, Pharmacie et médicament en Méditerranée occidentale (XIIIe –XVIe siècles), Sciences,
Techniques et Civilisations du Moyen Âge à l’Aube des Lumières (Paris: Honoré Champion,
1999).
41
N. G. Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of Italian Medical Learning
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); M. R. McVaugh, Medicine Before the Plague:
Practitioners and Their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285 –1345 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993).
42
For a description of the Bolognese archival holdings, see T. Dean, ‘Theft and Gender in Late
Medieval Bologna’, Gender and History, 20 (August 2008): 399– 415. My thanks to Carol
Lansing for sharing with me an example of a medical case.
43
García-Ballester published many results from these researches in his own right. See the
Bibliography below for two posthumous collections of essays.
44
C. Ferragud, Medicina i promoció social a la baixa edat mitjana (Corona d’Aragó, 1350–1410)
(Madrid: CSIC, 2005); C. Vela, L’obrador d’un apotecari medieval segons el llibre de comptes de
Francesc ses Canes (Barcelona, 1378–1381) (Barcelona: CSIC, 2003); and the bibliography listed
on the Sciencia.cat website (see ‘Digital Resources’ in the bibliography below).
45
A. Montford, Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); M. K. K. H. Yearl, ‘The Time of Bloodletting’, Ph.D. diss. (Yale
University, 2005); P. Horden, ‘A Non-Natural Environment: Medicine without Doctors and
the Medieval European Hospital’, in P. Horden, Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later
Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
46
For example, J. Ziegler, ‘Religion and Medicine: On the Adaptation of Latin and Vernacular
Medical Texts to Hebrew Readership’, Würzburger medizinhistorische Mitteilungen, 18 (1999):
149–58; C. Caballero Navas, ‘The Care of Women’s Health and Beauty: An Experience Shared
by Medieval Jewish and Christian Women’, Journal of Medieval History, 34 (2008): 146–63;
M. H. Green and D. L. Smail, ‘The Trial of Floreta d’Ays (1403): Jews, Christians, and Obstetrics
in Later Medieval Marseille’, Journal of Medieval History, 34 (2008): 185–211.

47
I. McCleery, ‘ “Multos ex medicinae arte curaverat, multos verbo et oratione”: Curing in
Medieval Portuguese Saints’ Lives’, Studies in Church History, 41 (2005): 192–202; J. Ziegler,
‘Practitioners and Saints: Medical Men in Canonization Processes in the Thirteenth to Fifteenth
Centuries’, Social History of Medicine, 12 (1999): 191–225; R. E. Surtz, ‘A Spanish Midwife’s
Uses of the Word: The Inquisitorial Trial (1485/86) of Joana Torrellas’, Mediaevistik: Interna-
tionale Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Mittelalterforschung, 19 (2006): 153– 68.
48
E. L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood: Gender, Dynasty, and Visual Culture in the Later Middle Ages
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). For similar work that raises the analytical bar
on working with images, see the section ‘Studies of Medical Images’ in the Bibliography below.
49
S. K. Wray, ‘Tracking Families and Flight in Bologna during the Black Death’, Medieval
Prosopography, 25 (2004 [appeared 2008]): 145–60.
50
Documenting women’s medical experiences, for example, is just as difficult for the medieval
period as for many other places and times. For two unusual cases where legal concerns pro-
duced detailed records of childbirth, see M. Cabré (trans.), ‘Public record of the labour of Isabel
de la Cavalleria. January 10, 1490, Zaragoza’, The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies,
http://www.the-orb.net/birthrecord.html, accessed July 20, 2008; Green and Smail, ‘Trial of
Floreta d’Ays’.
51
V. Lo and C. Cullen (eds), Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts,
Needham Research Institute Series (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005). Most recently on the
Genizah materials, see E. Lev and Z. Amar, Practical ‘Materia medica’ of the Medieval Eastern
Mediterranean according to the Cairo Genizah, Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series, vol. 7 (Leiden/
Boston, MA: Brill, 2008).
52
The recent textbook by Pormann and the leading authority on medieval Islamic medicine,
Emilie Savage-Smith, offers an excellent overview of current knowledge in the field. See under
‘Textbooks’ in the Bibliography below.
53
S. Kuttner, Repertorium der Kanonistik (1140–1234): Prodromus corporis glossarum, Studi e Testi
71 (Città del Vaticano, 1972); M. H. Green, ‘Rethinking the Manuscript Basis of Salvatore De
Renzi’s Collectio Salernitana: The Corpus of Medical Writings in the “Long” Twelfth Century’,
in D. Jacquart and A. Paravicini Bagliani (eds), La ‘Collectio Salernitana’ di Salvatore De Renzi,
Edizione Nazionale ‘La Scuola medica Salernitana’, 3 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galuzzo,
2008), 15–60.
54
Middle English is far ahead of other language groups in having this crucial need addressed:
J. Norri, Names of Sicknesses in English, 1400–1550: An Exploration of the Lexical Field, Annales
Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Dissertationes humanarum litterarum, 63 (Helsinki: Suoma-
lainen Tiedeakatemia, 1992); Norri, Names of Body Parts in English, 1400–1550, Annales
Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Humaniora 291 (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennicae,
1998); I. Taavitsainen and P. Pahta (eds), Medical and Scientific Writing in Late Medieval English
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); I. Taavitsainen, P. Pahta, and M. Mäkinen
(eds), Middle English Medical Texts, CD-ROM (Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 2005).
55
See The Anglo-Norman Online Hub, http://www.anglo-norman.net/, accessed December 30,
2008.
56
Further information on the research group Speculum medicinae can be found at http://
www.fyl.uva.es/~wspecmed; several of the links were inactive on the day that I visited the site,
December 10, 2008. For a preliminary report on the dictionary project, see Ana Isabel Martín
Ferreira, ‘El DILAG (Diccionario Latino de Andrología y Ginecología) del grupo Speculum
medicinae (Universidad de Valladolid)’, http://descargas.cervantesvirtual.com/servlet/SirveObras/
01482963878920747460035/031275.pdf?incr=1, accessed January 27, 2009.
57
Volumes forthcoming in the Micrologus’s Library series include: 26.) L’hérédité au Moyen Age,
ed. Ch. de Miramon, M. van der Lugt, 2008; 27.) Le monde végétal. Médecine, Botanique,
Symbolique, ed. A. Paravicini Bagliani, 2009; 28.) Exempla medicorum, ed. M. Gadebusch, Th.
Ricklin, 2009; 29.) Piacere e dolore. Materiali per una storia delle passioni nel Medioevo, ed. C.
Casagrande e S. Vecchio, 2009; and 30.) Between Text and Patient: The Medical Enterprise in
Medieval & Early Modern Europe, ed. F. E. Glaze, B. Nance, 2009. The journal Early Science and
Medicine tends to publish more on science than medicine, though that may be a factor more of
scholars’ submission decisions than editorial bent. Work on medieval medicine appears periodi-
cally in all the North American and European medical history journals.

58
The listserv name is MEDMED-L. To subscribe, go to http://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/
wa?A0=MEDMED-L.
59
M. F. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The ‘Viaticum’ and its Commentaries (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990); J. Citrome, The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature,
The New Middle Ages (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).
60
See for example, I. Ventura, ‘Das Buch 17 von De proprietatibus rerum: Ein Überblick über
die Quellen und die Konzeption der Botanik’, in B. Van den Abeele and H. Meyer (eds),
Bartholomäus Anglicus, De proprietatibus rerum: Texte latin et réception vernaculaire / Lateinischer Text
und volkssprachige Rezeption (Actes du colloque international, Münster, 9–11.10.2003), De Diversis
Artibus 74, N.S. 37 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 267–317.
Bibliography
My objective in the following bibliography is to provide a very selective
list of major studies representative of the best work in the field of medieval
medical history as well as tools for independent research; I repeat citations
from the notes only for items of general significance. I privilege the most
recent scholarship; earlier works are included selectively and only when
they are still indispensable. Items that include primary sources in modern
English translation (and which are therefore especially useful for teaching
purposes) are marked with an asterisk.
general overviews and textbooks1

Conrad, L., et al. The Western Medical Tradition, 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge/New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Jacquart, D., and Micheau, F., La médecine arabe et l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Maisonneuve et
Larose, 1990).
Nutton, V., Ancient Medicine (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004).
Park, K., ‘Medicine and Society in Medieval Europe, 500–1500’, in A. Wear (ed.), Medicine in
Society: Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 59–90.
Pormann, P., and Savage-Smith, E., Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: University of Edin-
burgh Press, 2007).
Rawcliffe, C., Medicine and Society in Later Medieval England (Stroud, Gloucestershire: A. Sutton,
1995).
Siraisi, N. G., Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
major monographic studies, essay collections, and book series

Ait, I., Tra Scienza e mercato: Gli speziali a Roma nel tardo medioevo, Fonti e Studi per la storia
economica e sociale di Roma e dello Stato pontificio, VII (Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi
Romani, 1996). [A social and institutional study of apothecaries in Rome.]
Amasuno, M., Medicina ante la ley: La ‘licencia practicandi’ y el ejercicio de la medicina en la Castilla
bajomedieval (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León, 2002).
Benedictow, O. J., The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History (Woodbridge/Suffolk:
Boydell Press, 2004).
Bénézet, Jean-Pierre, Pharmacie et médicament en Méditerranée occidentale (XIIIe–XVIe siècles), Sciences,
Techniques et Civilisations du Moyen Âge à l’Aube des Lumières (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1999).
Biller, P., The Measure of Multitude: Population in Medieval Thought (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
Bowers, B. S. (ed.), The Medieval Hospital and Medical Practice. AVISTA Studies in the History
of Medieval Technology, Science and Art, 3 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

Demaitre, L. E., Leprosy in Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
Dendle, P., and Touwaide, A. (eds), Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2008).
French, R., Arrizabalaga, J., Cunningham, A., and Garcia-Ballester, L. (eds), Medicine from the
Black Death to the French Disease (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).
García-Ballester, L., Medicine in a Multicultural Society: Christian, Jewish and Muslim Practitioners in
the Spanish Kingdoms, 1222–1610, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS702 (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2001).
García-Ballester, L., Galen and Galenism: Theory and Medical Practice from Antiquity to the European
Renaissance, ed. Jon Arrizabalaga, Montserrat Cabré, Lluís Cifuentes, Fernando Salmón Vario-
rum Collected Studies Series: CS710 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
García-Ballester, L., French, R., Arrizabalaga, J., and Cunningham, A. (eds), Practical Medicine
from Salerno to the Black Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Glaze, F. E., and Nance, B. (eds), Between Text and Patient: The Medical Enterprise in Medieval
and Early Modern Europe, Micrologus’ Library (Florence: SISMEL, forthcoming 2009). [Table
of contents available at http://ww2.coastal.edu/brian/betweentextandpatient.htm, accessed
November 16, 2008.]
Green, M. H., Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern
Gynaecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Guérin-Beauvois, M., and Martin, J.-M. (eds), Bains curatifs et bains hygiéniques en Italie de
l’Antiquité au Moyen Age, Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome, 383 (Rome: Ecole
française de Rome, 2007).
Horden, P., Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2008).
Horden, P., The First Hospitals (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, forthcoming
2009).
Horden, P., and Savage-Smith, E. (eds), The Year 1000: Medical Practice at the End of the First
Millennium, special issue of Social History of Medicine, 13/2 (August 2000). See also the notes
on a follow-up meeting held at Oxford in November 2000, posted online at http://
www.sshm.org/year1000/overall.htm, accessed March 13, 2009.
Huizenga, E., Tussen autoriteit en empirie: De Middelnederlandse chirurgieën in de veertiende en
viftiende eeuw en hun maatschappelijke context, Artesliteratuur in de Nederlanden, 2 (Hilversum:
Uitgeverij Verloren, 2003).
Jacquart, D., Le milieu médical en France du XIIe au XVe siècle: En annexe 2e supplément au
‘Dictionnaire’ d’Ernest Wickersheimer (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1981).
Librandi, R., and Piro, R. (eds), Lo scaffale della biblioteca scientifica in volgare (secoli XIII–XVI):
Atti del Convegno (Matera, 14 –15 ottobre 2004), Micrologus’ Library 16 (Firenze: Edizioni del
Galluzzo, 2006).
Little, L. K. (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
van der Lugt, M., Le ver, le démon et la vierge: les théories médiévales de la génération extraordinaire.
Une étude sur les rapports entre théologie, philosophie naturelle et médecine (Paris: Belles lettres, 2004).
McVaugh, M. R., Medicine before the Plague: Practitioners and Their Patients in the Crown of Aragon,
1285–1345 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
McVaugh, M. R., The Rational Surgery of the Middle Ages, Micrologus’ Library, no. 15 (Florence:
SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2006).
Metzler, I., Disability in Medieval Europe: Physical Impairment in the High Middle Ages, c.1100–
c.1400, Routledge Studies in Medieval Religion & Culture (London: Routledge, 2006).
Micrologus. [Published annually since 1993, each issue addresses a thematic topic such as ‘the
corpse’, ‘the five senses’, or ‘the heart’. The latest volume (Micrologus XVI, 2008), is entitled
I saperi nelle corti / Knowledge at the Courts, which includes essays such as a study of Michele
Savonarola’s (d. 1466) politico-ethical writings at the d’Este court in Ferrara, illustrated
Tacuinum sanitatis manuscripts, and dietetics at court.]
Micrologus’ Library. [Books in this series are regularly devoted to medical topics. Most recent
are I. Draelants, Le ‘Liber de virtutibus herbarum, lapidum et animalium (Liber aggregationis)’. Un

texte à succès attribué à Albert le Grand, Micrologus’ Library, 22 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni

del Galluzzo, 2007); A. Akasoy, C. Burnett, and R. Yoeli-Tlalim (eds), Astro-Medicine:
Astrology and Medicine, East and West, Micrologus’ Library, 25 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni
del Galuzzo, 2008).]
Montford, A., Health, Sickness, Medicine and the Friars in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
Nicoud, M., Les régimes de santé au Moyen Âge: naissance et diffusion d’une écriture médicale,
XIIIe–XVe siècle. Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 333 ([Rome]:
École française de Rome, 2007).
Park, K., Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York,
NY: Zone Books, 2006).
La Scuola Medica Salernitana. [Published in Florence by SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo
beginning in 2007, this series includes both the revised proceedings of conferences that
have been held under the auspices of the Commissione Scientifica dell’Edizione Nazionale
‘La Scuola Medica Salernitana’, and editions of critical edited texts related to the Salernitan
school.]
Touati, F.-O., Maladie et société au Moyen Âge: La lèpre, les lépreux et les léproseries dans la province
ecclésiastique de Sens jusqu’au milieu du XIVe siècle, Bibliothèque du Moyen Age, 11 (Brussels:
De Boeck Université, 1998).
Vela, C., L’obrador d’un apotecari medieval segons el llibre de comptes de Francesc ses Canes (Barcelona,
1378–1381) (Barcelona: CSIC, 2003).
*Wack, M. F., Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The ‘Viaticum’ and its Commentaries (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).
essay reviews
Bianchi, F., ‘Italian Renaissance Hospitals: An Overview of the Recent Historiography’,
Mitteilungen des Instituts für osterreichische Geschichtsforschung, 115 (2007): 394–403.
Caballero Navas, C., ‘Medicine among Medieval Jews: The Science, the Art, and the Practice’,
in G. Freudenthal (ed.), Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
Cadden, Joan., ‘Western Medicine and Natural Philosophy’, in V. L. Bullough and J. A. Brundage
(eds), Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York, NY/London: Garland, 1996), 51–80.
Green, M. H., ‘Bodies, Gender, Health, Disease: Recent Work on Medieval Women’s Medicine’,
Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd ser., 2 (2005): 1– 46.
Green, M. H., ‘Medicine in the Archives: Resources for Researching Medical History Topics’,
Medieval Feminist Forum, 40 (Winter 2005–2006): 60–7, 83– 6.
Green, M. H., ‘Gendering the History of Women’s Healthcare’, Gender and History, Twentieth
Anniversary Special Issue, 20/3 (November 2008): 487–518.
Horden, P., ‘What’s Wrong with Early Medieval Medicine?’, Social History of Medicine, 21
(forthcoming).
Martin, J.-M., and Guérin-Beauvois, M., ‘Introduction méthodologique’, in M. Guérin-
Beauvois and J.-M. Martin (eds), Bains curatifs et bains hygiéniques en Italie de l’Antiquité au
Moyen Age, Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome, 383 (Rome: Ecole française de Rome,
2007), 1–19.
Salmón, F., ‘Trends and Recent Work in the History of Medieval Medicine (1993 –1998)’, in
Congrès européen d’études médiévales (ed.), Bilan et perspectives des études médiévales (1993–1998):
Euroconference (Barcelone, 1999) (2nd, Barcelone, Spain 1999) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004).
studies of medical images (see also ‘digital resources’ below)

Collins, M., Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions, The British Library Studies in Medieval
Culture (London: British Library; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).
Givens, J., Reeds, K., and Touwaide, A. (eds), Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History,
1200 –1550 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
Jones, P. M., Medieval Medicine in Illuminated Manuscripts, rev. ed. (London: British Library [by]

arrangement with Centro Tibaldi, 1998). [This edition should be used in preference to the
earlier one, Medieval Medical Miniatures (1984), which does not have as many images.]
L’Estrange, E., Holy Motherhood: Gender, Dynasty, and Visual Culture in the Later Middle Ages
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).
MacKinney, L., Medical Illustrations in Medieval Manuscripts (Berkeley/Los Angeles, CA: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1965). [Some flaws, but still indispensable.]
resources for finding medical texts by subject matter, author, or title

Agrimi, J., and Crisciani, C., Les ‘consilia’ medicaux, trans. Caroline Viola, Typologie des sources
du moyen âge occidental, fasc. 69 (Brepols: Turnhout, 1994).
Cifuentes i Comamala, L., La ciència en català a l’Edat Mitjana i el Renaixement (Barcelona:
Universitat de Barcelona, 2002).
Green, M. H., ‘Medieval Gynecological Texts: A Handlist’, in M. H. Green (ed.), Women’s
Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS680
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), Appendix, 1–36.
Kibre, P., Hippocrates Latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings in the Latin Middle Ages, rev. ed.
(New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 1985).
Kristeller, P. O., Iter Italicum, 6 vols. (London/Leiden: Warburg Institute and E. J. Brill, 1963–).
[Also available in an online version (by subscription only).]
Jansen-Sieben, R., Repertorium van de Middelnederlandse Artes-Literatuur (Utrecht: H & S Hes
Uitgevers, 1989). [To be supplemented by bibliography posted on the website of WEMAL
– Werkgroep Middelnederlandse Artesliteratuur (Workgroup on Medieval Netherlandish
Artes Literature), http://wemal.let.uu.nl/repertorium.html, accessed May 21, 2009.]
Thorndike, L., and Kibre, P., Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA:
Medieval Academy of America, 1963). An updated, digitized version of Thorndike-Kibre
(called ‘eTK’), edited by L. E. Voigts and P. Deery Kurtz, can now be found online at
http://cctr1.umkc.edu/cgi-bin/search, accessed May 21, 2009.
Voigts, L. E., and Deery Kurtz, P. (eds), Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle English:
An Electronic Reference, The Society for Early English & Norse Electronic Texts (Ann Arbor,
MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000). CD-ROM. An updated version of the Voigts-Kurtz
database (called ‘eVK’) can now be found online at http://cctr1.umkc.edu/cgi-bin/search,
accessed May 21, 2009.
biographical information on medical authors or practitioners

Bynum, W. F., and Bynum, H. (eds), Dictionary of Medical Biography, 5 vols. (Westport, CT:
Greenwood, 2006).
Dizionario biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Encicopedia Italiana, 1960–), vols. 1– 67
[through ‘Malaspina’ as of 2008].
Getz, F. M., ‘Medical Practitioners in Medieval England’, Social History of Medicine 3 (1990):
245–83. [A supplement to Talbot and Hammond.]
Glick, T. F., Livesey, S. J., and Wallis, F. (eds), Medieval Science, Technology and Medicine: An
Encyclopedia (New York, NY/London: Routledge, 2005).
Haase, W., and Temporini, H. (eds), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (Berlin/New
York, NY: Walter de Gruyter, 1972–). [A number of the essays on ancient physicians here
will have relevance for medieval studies. For example, the essay on Soranus of Ephesus by
A. E. Hanson and M. H. Green, Teilband II, Band 37.2 (1994): 968–1075, includes a section
on Soranus’s Nachleben in the Middle Ages, with a comprehensive list of surviving manu-
scripts of both the original Greek text and late antique Latin translations.]
Ruh, K., general editor. Die deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters: Verfasserlexikon, 2nd ed., in
progress (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1978–2000). [Includes entries on writers
whose works were composed or translated into German. Many essays on medical writers are
so comprehensive as to be worth consulting even if you are not interested in the Germanic
translations.]

Sezgin, F., Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums. Band III: Medizin-Pharmazie-Zoologie-Tierheilkunde

bis ca. 430 H. (Leiden: Brill, 1970).
Sharpe, R., A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540: Additions and
Corrections, 1997–2001 (Turnhout/Belgium: Brepols, 2001).
Talbot, C. H., and Hammond, E. A., The Medical Practitioners in Medieval England: A Biographical
Register (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1965). [To be supplemented by Getz,
‘Medical Practitioners’, and by individual entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, and online).]
Ullmann, M., Die Medizin im Islam, Handbuch der Orientalistik (Leiden: Brill, 1970).
Wickersheimer, E., Dictionnaire biographique des médecins en France au Moyen Age, repr. ed., 2 vols.
(Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1979 [1936]). D. Jacquart, Supplément to Ernest Wickersheimer,
Dictionnaire biographique des médecins en France au Moyen Age (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1979).
[Further addenda can be found in an appendix to Jacquart’s Milieu médical (see above).]
recent critical editions

Archimatheus Salernitanus, Erklärungen zur hippokratischen Schrift Prognostikon. Nach der Hand-
schrift Trier Bischöfliches Priesterseminar 76, ed. H. Grensemann, rev. ed. (Hamburg, 2004
[2002]), http://www.uke.uni-hamburg.de/institute/geschichte-medizin/index_18229, accessed
December 7, 2006.
Archimatheus Salernitanus, Glossae in Isagogas Johannitii: Ein Kursus in mittelalterlicher Physiologie
nach dem Codex Trier Bischöfliches Priesterseminar 76A und dem Codex Toletanus Archivo y Biblioteca
Capitulares 97–14, ed. H. Grensemann (Hamburg, 2004), http://www.uke.uni-hamburg.de/
institute/geschichte-medizin/index_18229.php, accessed June 6, 2005.
Arnau da Vilanova [d. 1311], Arnaldi de Villanova Opera medica omnia, vol. 2 (Granada [etc.]:
Seminarium Historiae Medicae Granatensis, 1981). [All other volumes: Barcelona: Seminarium
Historiae Medicae Granatensis, 1981–. Editors vary. As of 2008, volumes 1– 4, 6.1–2, 7.1,
10.1–2, 11, 16, and 17 have appeared. Twenty volumes are projected in all. Most volumes
include translations of the prefatory material into Catalan.]
*Barkaï, R., A History of Jewish Gynaecological Texts in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1998).
Barratt, A. (ed.), The Knowing of Woman’s Kind in Childing: A Middle English Version of Material
Derived from the ‘Trotula’ and Other Sources, Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts, 4 (Turn-
hout: Brepols, 2001).
Ben Yom Tov, D., Hebrew Medical Astrology: David Ben Yom Tov, Kelal Qatan: Original Hebrew
Text, Medieval Latin Translation, Modern English Translation, eds. G. Bos, C. Burnett, and Y. T.
Langermann (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 2005).
*García-Ballester, L., McVaugh, M. R., and Rubio-Vela, A. (eds), Medical Licensing and Learning
in Fourteenth-Century Valencia, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 79, pt. 6 (Phila-
delphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1989).
García González, A. (ed.), Alphita: Edición crítica y comentario, Edizione Nazionale ‘La Scuola
Medica Salernitana’, 2 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2007).
*Green, M. H. (ed. and trans.), The ‘Trotula’: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
Guy de Chauliac, Inventarium sive Chirurgia magna, ed. M. R. McVaugh, with M. S. Ogden,
Studies in Ancient Medicine, vol. 14, I and II (Leiden/New York, NY: Brill, 1997).
Hunt, T., Anglo-Norman Medicine, 2 vols. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994–1997).
Langslow, D., The Latin Alexander Trallianus: The Text and Transmission of a Late Latin Medical
Book, Journal of Roman Studies Monographs, 10 (London: Society for the Promotion of
Roman Studies, 2006).
Maimonides, M., Medical Aphorisms. A Parallel Arabic-English edition = Kitab al-fusul fi al-tibb /
Treatises 6 –9, ed. G. Bos (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2007).
Maimonides, M., Maimonides. On Asthma: Critical Editions of Medieval Hebrew and Latin Translations,
eds G. Bos and M. R. McVaugh. Vol. 2 (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press,
2008).
Martín Ferreira, A. I. (ed.), Tratado médico de Constantino el Africano: Constantini Liber de elephancia
([Valladolid]: Universidad de Valladolid, 1996).

Moulinier, L. (ed.), Beate Hildegardis Cause et cure, Rarissima mediaevalia, 1 (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 2003).
Pormann, P. E., The Oriental Tradition of Paul of Aegina’s ‘Pragmateia’, Studies in Ancient Medi-
cine, 29 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).
Tavormina, M. T. (ed.), Sex, Aging, and Death in a Medieval Medical Compendium: Trinity College
Cambridge MS R.14.52, Its Texts, Language, and Scribe, Medieval & Renaissance Texts and
Studies, 292, 2 vols. (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies,
2006).
Trotter, D. (ed.), Albucasis: traitier de Cyrurgie. Edition de la traduction en ancien français de la Chirurgie
d’Abu’l Qasim Halaf Ibn ‘Abbas al-Zahrawi du manuscrit BNF, français 1318 (Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer, 2005).
texts in modern english translation (see also asterisked items elsewhere

in this bibliography)
Cabré, M. (trans.), ‘Public Record of the Labour of Isabel de la Cavalleria. January 10, 1490,
Zaragoza’, at The Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies, http://www.the-orb.net/
birthrecord.html, accessed July 20, 2008.
Corner, G. W., Anatomical Texts of the Earlier Middle Ages (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute
of Washington, 1927). [Includes partial or full translations of texts from the 12th through
13th century.]
Grant, E. (ed.), A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1974). [Includes translations on topics ranging from anatomy to autopsies.]
Horrox, R. (trans.), The Black Death (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1994).
Jansen, K., Drell, J., and Andrews, F. (eds), Medieval Italy: Texts in Translation (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2009). [Contains several texts of relevance to
medical history.]
Thorndike, L. (ed.), University Records and Life in the Middle Ages, Records of Civilization,
Sources and Studies, 38, repr. ed. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1949 [1944]).
[Includes items having to do with the curriculum, dissection practices, and other ordinances
at various universities, especially Paris.]
digital resources2
Bibliographies
Bulletin de Médecine Ancienne / Ancient Medicine Newsletter, http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/amn/.
[A very important resource for aspects of medieval medicine that connect with the classical
tradition. Indexing is minimal, so comprehensive searches are necessary.]
Sciencia.cat, http://www.sciencia.cat/english/linksenglish/linkseng.htm. [Edited by Lluís
Cifuentes i Comamala, this is the best place to start research on Castillian and Catalan topics.
Includes an extensive bibliography on various aspects of medieval medicine and science, with
links to scanned documents.]
Incunabula and Printed Texts

An Analytic Bibliography of On-line Neo-latin Texts, http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/bibliography/
index.htm. [Well indexed and frequently updated. It currently contains 28,575 records of
online Renaissance editions.]
Biblioteca digital Dioscorides, http://www.ucm.es/BUCM/foa/dioscorides.htm. [Digitized texts from
early printed books in the Biblioteca Complutense in Madrid. This early attempt at digitization
did not produce high quality reproductions, but for rare texts this resource remains invaluable.]
Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Médecine et d’Odontologie, BIUM Collections medic@,
Médecins du Moyen Ages . . . Numeritisatées, http://web2.bium.univ-paris5.fr/livanc/?intro=
medievale&statut=charge. [Includes digital versions of such major 19th-century studies as E.
Nicaise’s study of the surgical writer Henri de Mondeville (c.1260–c.1320), and S. De
Renzi’s flawed but still indispensable Collectio Salernitana.]

Open-Access Secondary Sources

Dynamis: Acta Hispanica ad Medicinae Scientiarumque Historiam Illustrandam, http://www.ugr.es/
~dynamis/english/indexen/indexen.htm. [The full run up to 2007 of this leading Spanish
journal in medical history (since 1981) is available at Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert,
http://www.raco.cat/index.php/Dynamis.]
PubMed Central, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/fprender.fcgi?cmd=full_view. [This is a cen-
tralized database of medical journals made available for the free use of the public. Included
is the full run of Medical History, published by the Wellcome Trust in London. Historical
articles can also be found in a variety of other journals here, such as Proceedings of the Royal
Society of London.]
Sciencia.cat (see above).
Manuscript Databases
Jordanus, an International Catalogue of Mediaeval Scientific Manuscripts, http://jordanus.org/cgi-bin/
iccmsm?seite=home&sprache=en. [A database of hundreds of manuscript descriptions.]
Lawrence J. Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts, http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/sdm/. [Culls data on
manuscripts primarily from sale catalogs; it is intended to help locate and establish the
provenance of medieval manuscripts that have changed hands in the modern period.]
Images
Index of Medieval Medical Images: http://digital.library.ucla.edu/immi/. [From manuscripts in North
American collections.]
Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine, http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/arabic/
arabichome.html [Created in the mid-1990s by Emilie Savage-Smith, this online catalog/exhibit
from the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, MD, showcases a rich collec-
tion of manuscripts from the Islamic world. Although the quality of the images found here is
not high (this exhibit was made prior to the revolutions in digitization in the early 2000s),
the accompanying information on authors’ biographies, bibliography, and terminology are
invaluable.]
The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical Images, http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/mackinney/
?CISOROOT=/mackinney. [Drawn from the photographs and slides collected by Loren
MacKinney in the 1930s through 60s.]
Wellcome Library Images, http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/. [Produced by the Wellcome Library in
London, the foremost research center for the History of Medicine in the world. In many
cases, the medieval images are rather poor quality photos made from printed books.]
notes to bibliography
1
I have omitted works that do not engage with international scholarship; some of these,
however, may have their uses for readers looking for material in their native language. For
example, K. P. Jankrift, Krankheit und Heilkunde im Mittelalter, Geschichte Kompakt (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2003), which includes excerpts from primary sources in
modern German translation; and G. Penso, La Medicina medioevale, 2nd ed., Collana di Storia
della Medicina e di Cultura Medica (Noceto: Edizioni Essebiemme, 2002).
2
I have not included here sites that only present single manuscripts nor have I included major
national libraries (such as the British Library or the Bibliothèque Nationale de France) which
have been digitizing significant parts of their holdings. In most cases where images are included,
they are downloadable for teaching and research. All sites listed here were active as of the time
of writing.


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History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.

Integrative Medicine: Incorporating Medicine

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, studies surveying the general

when medical issues make themselves abundantly in evidence, their sig-

fertility had profound economic as well as social consequences, and newer

documents (civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical), archivally-based studies

Reclamation: The Philological Project

a critique of this older style of medical history as a history of intellectual

supposedly happened through the translation of works from the Arabic

processes by which medical knowledge was gendered in later medieval

anonymous Jewish scholar working in southern France between 1197 and

Medicine in the Archives

medieval Mediterranean Europe.40 Bénézet, a practicing pharmacist himself,

professionalization process, such as licensing and the creation of municipal

moves gracefully and persuasively across evidence from canonization

The Future of the History of Medieval Medicine

methodology, and in recognizing the ways in which medicine in particular

Valladolid who are working on various editing projects under the

suffer from a superficial grasp of medical theory and discursive habits.

Pennsylvania, 2001); and Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

de Médecine de Montpellier et son rayonnement (XIIIe–XVe siècles): actes du colloque international de

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

general overviews and textbooks1

major monographic studies, essay collections, and book series

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

texte à succès attribué à Albert le Grand, Micrologus’ Library, 22 (Florence: SISMEL/Edizioni

studies of medical images (see also ‘digital resources’ below)

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

resources for finding medical texts by subject matter, author, or title

biographical information on medical authors or practitioners

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

Sezgin, F., Geschichte des arabischen Schrifttums. Band III: Medizin-Pharmazie-Zoologie-Tierheilkunde

recent critical editions

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

texts in modern english translation (see also asterisked items elsewhere

Incunabula and Printed Texts

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

Open-Access Secondary Sources

© 2009 The Author History Compass 7/4 (2009): 1218–1245, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x

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