Healing and Society in Medieval England: A Middle English Translation of the Pharmaceutical Writings of Gilbertus Anglicus (Wisconsin publications in the history of science & medicine) - Hardcover

Gilbertus Anglicus

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0299129306 ISBN 13: 9780299129309

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991

When knowledge of Arabic and Greek medical texts began to penetrate 13th-century European universities, academic medicine suddenly had to master a new literature and terminology, a new pathology, and a new therapeutics. Sometime before 1250, Gilbertus Anglicus (Gilbert the Englishman) produced the "Compendium of Medicine", a primary text of this medical revolution. In the early 15th century, Gilbert's work was translated into Middle English from Latin. Faye Getz first identified this important vernacular manuscript at the Wellcome Institute in London. This edition presents the entire text for the first time, with an extensive introduction to the learned, practical, and social components in medieval medicine and to the text's historical and textual settings. The Middle English text consists mainly of medicinal recipes, with guides to diagnosis, medicinal preparation, and prognosis. Recipes are grouped according to the diseases for which they were useful, beginning with the head and moving down, from headaches to hemorrhoids. The text names over 400 ingredients, from gutted puppies to gold fillings, making it one of the largest sources of pharmaceutical and medical vocabulary every studied in Middle English. The editor provides a guide to the printed version of the original Latin, using the Latin text to help identify unknown or little-understood English words, which are presented in a glossary. She also summarizes the text in modern English.

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Review:

"[This] edition places in our hands a medical book that looks two ways: toward the massive Latin compilation of Gilbertus, whose rhetoric of medicine comes through surprisingly unfiltered, and toward the 'practices' of medicine mediated in English during the fifteenth-century."--Lea Olsan, Studies in the Age of Chaucer "A book that will continue to be consulted for a very long time and will be of as much interest to medical historians as to scholars of Middle English."--Peter Murray Jones, Bulletin of the History of Medicine [This] edition places in our hands a medical book that looks two ways: toward the massive Latin compilation of Gilbertus, whose rhetoric of medicine comes through surprisingly unfiltered, and toward the practices of medicine mediated in English during the fifteenth-century. Lea Olsan, "Studies in the Age of Chaucer"" A book that will continue to be consulted for a very long time and will be of as much interest to medical historians as to scholars of Middle English. Peter Murray Jones, "Bulletin of the History of Medicine""

About the Author:

Faye Marie Getz lives in Norfolk, England, and has honorary academic appointments in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. She appeared as a medieval physician in Terry Jones' Medieval Lives, an Emmy-nominated BBC documentary.

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