Reviews for Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice

The average rating for Medieval & Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-20 00:00:00 James Stevenson This was one of the texts for courses in the History of Science I took at the University of Oklahoma (which offers degrees in the History of Science). If I had a quarrel with the book, it's that it didn't offer much quarter to non-academic medicine. Except for the nobility and the rich in cities, most people got medical care locally during these periods, and the training and theoretical bases of midwifery, etc are fairly scantily covered in this book. There should also have been more coverage of the preservation of ancient Greek medical texts among the 'Saracens', and of the additions that Islamic scholars made to such classic authors as Hippocrates and Galen, and of how these sources of information were imported into Europe and beyond during the Crusades. The coverage of humoral theories of medicine is fairly comprehensive. It's necessary to carry this a little beyond medicine, since the four 'humors' were associated with other theories of basic nature. Ties to astrology and to the four 'essences' (Earth, air, fire and water), and also, of course, to such theories as the notion that beyond the earth a fifth essence ('quintessence') formed the basis of the cosmic spheres, meant that an understanding of academic theories of medicine required a good grounding in medieval cosmology as a whole until at least the 'rebirth' (really an innovation, but born from rediscovery of ancient texts) of the renaissance.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-06 00:00:00 Richard Lyday The writing was rather dry and easy to gloss over. A couple typos in the epilogue. Multiple instances of bringing points up only to say that they will be explained later in the book.