trove of Arabic translations of classical Greek works, Islamic medical
tomes, advanced international medical training, and his facility for many
languages.
Constantine synthesized (at times, freely plagiarized) Arabic medical
knowledge and finished a number of medical books in Latin, including
treatises of surgery, prognostics, medical practice, the urinary tract,
gastrointestinal disease, and medical instruments. His best known and
most voluminous work was the Liber pantegni, the first fully
comprehensive medical text in Latin.^29 By the time that Constantine was
working on the Pantegni, he had converted to Christianity and was a
Benedictine monk at the Monte Cassino monastery (between Naples and
Rome), and he would spend the last decade of his life on his project of
rendering medical textbooks in Latin.
Constantinus Africanus represents the change that was occurring in the
world: a Mediterranean Muslim, convert to Christianity, who translated
Arabic works into Latin presaged the return of Italian provinces to
Christian control, the ascendancy of Latin scholasticism, and the
domination of the West in medical education. Salerno would become
known as the “first medical school in the world” (Greeks, Egyptians, and
Arabs would contest this claim), and some would describe Constantine as
the Muslim who ignited the Renaissance.
The second major figure in the translation movement was Gerard of
Cremona (1114–1187 C.E.). While Constantine was an outsider who
brought his external works and languages into Latin culture, Gerard was an
insider (born in Cremona, Italy, the same city that gave us the
Stradivarius) who left Italy for Toledo, still under control of the caliphate
of Córdoba. Toledo was a city full of manuscripts and libraries, with
ancient classics in Arabic and the newer works of the great Albucasis.^30
For the next forty years, Gerard translated treatises on mathematics,
algebra, astronomy, philosophy, and medicine. It may be possible that a
“second” Gerard of Cremona was active in medical translation; schools of
translation were common, and when it comes to scholarly works of
antiquity, many authors usually contributed. “Gerard’s translation of the
Great Arabic medical encyclopedias like Avicenna’s The Canon of
Medicine opened the eyes of medical scholars in the West to the fact that
medicine was a rational science that could be studied logically and