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MEDICAL TEXTS
. With the rise of the universities in the 13th century, an increasing number of medical
texts become available to students and scholars along with such classics as Avicenna’s
Canon, Galen’s Ars parva, and Hippocrates’s Aphorismi or Pronostica. The great
majority of authors of medical texts were conferred degrees by the University of
Montpellier, where the best medical teaching among all nineteen French universities was
available. The broad body of known medical texts reveals the most common
preoccupations of both the authors and readers. They can be divided as follows: (1)
commentaries dealing with problems of medical doctrine; (2) practical books, such as
diets written for an individual, Consilia with diagnosis and prescriptions for certain
illnesses, and Experimenta, such as Arnaud de Villeneuve’s Tractatus de diversitatum
infirmitatum, which recorded various types of diseases witnessed by a doctor; (3) general
treatises, including such encyclopedias as Ricardus Anglicus’s Micrologus and Bernard
de Gordon’s Lilium Medicine; (4) treatises dealing with one medical specialty, such as
De pulsibus, De febribus (14th-c. plague literature belongs to this category); and (5) texts
related to antidotes and medications.
Medicine and surgery were one and the same discipline until the 13th century. One of
the most influential medical treatises of the period, Henri de Mondeville’s Chirurgie,
composed in Latin and then translated in an abridged form (B.N. fr. 2030), treats not so
much of surgery, as the title might suggest, but of potions, ointments, cosmetic
treatments, and recipes for treating specific ailments. The official surgeon of King Philip
IV, Henri had studied at Montpellier and often exercised his trade on the field of battle.
Only with the Chirurgia magna of Gui de Chauliac (1300–1368) do we encounter a
medical text devoted purely to surgery. Gui studied at Montpellier and practiced at
Avignon, where he was the doctor to three popes, Clement VI, Innocent VI, and Urban V.
His work was translated into French in the 14th century, as well as into Occitan, Dutch,
Middle English, and Hebrew; it was first printed at Venice in 1498. Jacques Despars,
who practiced medicine in the entourage of Philip the Good of Burgundy, devoted thirty
years (1432–53) to the Commentarius in Canones Avicennae, his summa of the medical
knowledge of the 15th century, which included quotations from Greek and Arabic
writers, problems of doctine, and practical examples.
Although over 80 percent of all medical texts were written in Latin, some practical
texts dealing with health, hygiene, or the plague were composed in the vernacular, in both
verse and prose: among the more important are the anonymous 13th-century Anglo-
Norman Novele chirurgie, Jean Falco’s Notables déclaratifs sur le Guidon, and Jean le
Lièvre’s Petit traictié sur le fait du nombre de la déclairacion des vaynes qui sont assises
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