Breaking Skin in Early Modern Italy
This paper presents the challenges of representing infirmities, from smallpox to toothache, that involved rupturing the skin posed in Early Modern Europe.
BOOK REVIEW: Medieval Medicine: Its Mysteries and Science by Toni Mount
Our review of Toni Mount’s fascinating look at medicine in the Middle Ages in – Medieval Medicine: Its Mysteries and Science by Toni Mount.
Neither ill nor healthy: The intermediate state between health and disease in medieval medicine
Paradoxically, however, the notion of an intermediate state between health and disease also has a long history, harking back, at least, to the times of Galen. The question of the existence of such a state and the utility and necessity for physicians to acknowledge it, was particularly hotly debated in the Middle Ages…
Light through the dark ages: The Arabist contribution to Western ophthalmology
Because blindness was a major cause of morbidity in the medieval Arab world, as is the case in the developing world today, Arabist physicians developed much exposure to ophthalmological conditions, and nearly every major medical work written at the time had a chapter on diseases of the eye.
Technologies of authority in the medical classroom in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
In this paper I would like to explore the strategies developed by the university medical master towards the recognition and establishment of authority for himself and for those contemporary authors who, like himself, worked within the medieval Studia. I would develop this possibility by analysing a uniquely academic product, the medical commentary.
Italian Renaissance Food-Fashioning or The Triumph of Greens
Conceptions of food in the Renaissance were also still influenced by the humoral-Galenic theory, which said that to keep the different ‘humors’ of the body in balance, a good diet had to be the result of foods balancing the moist/water and the dry/air, the warm/fire and the cold/earth, recalling again the four Aristotelian elements.