3 - Writing Medicine Differently

Summary

In the last chapter, we looked at the writings, authored or compiled, associated with the Franciscan William Holme. This chapter will pursue further questions about the kinds of medical writing in England. It will be about form rather than content in medicine, and I will leave questions about striking features in the content of friars’ medical writing until Chapter 4. I will argue in this chapter that friars’ writings on medicine differed in some important respects from those which emerged from university medical teaching. Part of the difference is accounted for by the slow and hesitant process of the emergence of teaching of medicine at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. No texts are known to survive from the thirteenth century testifying to English masters teaching medicine at the English universities. No English-educated physician is known from the thirteenth century, and there was no degree-awarding faculty of medicine before the fourteenth. An absence of English contributions to the scholastic literature of medicine before the fourteenth century, and its stuttering development in later centuries, meant that the contributions of the friars to medical writing filled a gap which in countries like Italy and France was not so evident.

This is not to say that circulation and knowledge of medical texts was behindhand in England. English monastic houses acquired the texts associated with the label Salernitan medicine early, compared to most of their continental counterparts: Monica Green talks of Salerno on the Thames, using this phrase to capture the rapid transmission of medical texts from the southern Italian lands controlled by the Normans to their relations in post-conquest England. English monastic houses were keen to acquire these texts, as lists of their libraries show. Texts dealing with materia medica (antidotaries, herbals) and those dealing with diagnostics and therapeutics (Practica texts) were particularly in demand. The friars in England were pioneers in the construction of lists of books held in monasteries of all the religious orders, and they were keen to put medical and natural philosophical books to use in the study of the Bible and patristics. It is no surprise that the Salernitan medical texts to be found in monastic libraries were also reflected in compilations on medicine by friars. A good example are the sources used by Henry Daniel in his Liber uricrisiarum.