Beyond the book: Charles Singer and Anglo-Saxon medicine revisited

By Peter L. Denton

Canadian Bulletin of Medical History vol.3:2 (1986)

Abstract: The supposed intellectual superiority of literate over non-literate cultures has admittedly been under attack for several decades. In the history of medicine as in other disciplines, however, the essential problem has been one of available sources: it is obvious that oral cultures leave few written records. What records do exist are later transcriptions of an indeterminate oral tradition, and are thus subject to a variety of interpretative approaches.

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