Revisiting Medical Humanism in Renaissance Europe (original) (raw)
Related papers
Introduction: Why “Revisit” Medical Humanism in Renaissance Europe?
Arts et Savoirs, 2021
Why focus on “medical humanism” in 2021, a notion that may appear familiar to all and remote from current trends in research? Do we not know everything about the genesis of the Aldine editions of Dioscorides, Galen, and Hippocrates? About the great ‘medical philologists’ of the sixteenth century, from Leoniceno to Scaliger? About the quarrel between Arabists and Hellenists? The answers to these questions are far from clear, and this collection of articles expresses a shared, deep-seated convi...
Medical Humanism in the Making: Symphorien Champier (1471-1539) and Galen
Arts et Savoirs, 2021
This article explores various aspects of medical humanism through the figure of French polymath Symphorien Champier. A passeur of knowledge between the ancients and the moderns, as well as between Italy and France, Champier developed as a scholar in the wake of the unearthing of ancient medical works, notably Galen’s. This article reveals the interplay between Champier’s intellectual trajectory and the redicovery of Galen’s thought.
The Doctor-Patient Relationship in the Renaissance
European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health, 2021
Based on the practice journals, personal notes, and letters of learned physicians from the German speaking regions, this paper seeks to reconstruct the lived reality of the doctor-patient relationship in the sixteenth century. Even many affluent and educated patients were quick to consult another practitioner when they were not satisfied, and the physicians resorted to various strategies to win and maintain the patient's trust. These included preferring or outright inventing a diagnosis the patient could not prove wrong and deliberately exaggerating the severity of the disease so the physicians would gain all the more praise (and money) when the patient got better. On the positive side, the physicians respected their patients' desire for certain medicines and their dislike of others, and went to great lengths to provide them with an explanation of what was happening inside their bodies that made sense to them and matched their personal bodily experience.
2014
Galen’s treatises, regarded as a fundamental part of medical education, had already been translated into Latin, commented and included in the university curricula of the Middle Ages. Yet there was a new interest in these works developed by Renaissance humanists, who knew Greek and were able to read Galen “in the original”. In order to facilitate the study of these treatises by students whose knowledge of Greek remained inadequate, there were many Latin translations and commentaries of Galen’s works by Renaissance humanists. We will focus on two commented editions of Galen’s De morborum differentiis/causis, De symptomatum differentiis/causis. The fist one (Lyon, 1540) contains the Latin translation of Guillaume Cop and the commentary by Francois Valleriole, a French physician of Arles. The second one (Paris, 1550) contains the Latin translation and commentary by the German humanist Leonhart Fuchs. Our first purpose is to study the relationship of each translator with the Greek langua...