Science and Medicine 203about the relationship between medicine and philosophy. “Most of those
who study nature,” wrote Aristotle, “end by dealing with medicine, while
those of the doctors who practise their art in a more philosophical man-
ner take their medical principles from nature.”^4 Because the art of medi-
cine focused on natural things, the fi rst- century Roman Pliny, perhaps the
fi rst to write about medicine in Latin, regarded it as a part of natural his-
tory.^5 Galen, a century later, likened the art of medicine to that of archery,
which relied more on practice than on reasoning.^6 The eleventh- century
Persian physician Ibn Sı ̄na ̄ (known in Europe as Avicenna) began his im-
mense and immensely infl uential Canon of Medicine by defi ning medicine
as “the science by which we learn the various states of the human body,
when in health and when not in health, whereby health is conserved and
whereby it is restored, after being lost.”^7
Until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the new universi-
ties started bestowing MD degrees on their medical graduates, there was
little reason to discuss the relationship between medicine and scientia. The
distinction between the learned physicus, who had studied the liberal arts
and natural philosophy in the university, and the skilled but unlettered
medicus (healer) became commonplace. As the highly regarded twelfth-
century medicus William of Malmesbury noted, his reputation derived from
successful practice, not from “scientia.”^8 Eager for academic status and intel-
lectual respectability in the new world of the university, physicians such as
Taddeo Alderotti, the infl uential thirteenth- century doctor at the studium
of Bologna, took the lead in promoting medicine as a subdivision of natu-
ral philosophy, distinct from, though informed by, scientia naturalis. Infl u-
enced by Avicenna, whose Canon served as the centerpiece of the medical
curriculum, Taddeo defi ned medicine as “the science by which the disposi-
tions of the human body are known... so that health may be maintained
or, if lost, recovered.” He highlighted the connection between medicine
and natural philosophy in part to distinguish the work of physicians from
“the usual practice that old women carry on.”^9 The fourteenth- century
French physician and surgeon Guy de Chauliac made much the same
point. “If the doctors have not learned geometry, astronomy, dialectics,
nor any other good discipline,” he wrote, “soon the leather workers, carpen-
ters, and furriers will quit their own occupations and become doctors.”^10
Not all medieval scholars applauded the efforts to hitch medicine to
scientia. The twelfth- century Paris theologian Hugh of St. Victor pointedly
assigned medicine—along with the making of fabrics and armaments,
navigation, commerce, agriculture, hunting, and theatrics—to the me-
chanical arts (mechanica), which required more manual skill than intel-
ligence, rather than to theorica, which comprised theologia, mathematica,