Canonical Medicine: Gentile da Foligno and Scholasticism. .

Roger French. Canonical Medicine: Gentile da Foligno and Scholasticism.

Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001. viii + 342 pp. index, append. illus. bibl. $105. ISBN: 90-04-11707-5.

Once again we are indebted to the late Professor Roger French and to the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. His latest work is an attempt to understand scholasticism as it applies to medieval medicine, reflected in the thought of Gentile da Foligno (d. 1348), who probably trained in Bologna under Taddeo Alderorti (d. 1295) and whose teaching career was spent in Siena, Padua, and especially Perugia (4).

The main purpose of French's book is to answer the question, what was scholasticism? "What follows is nor an attempt to define medical scholasticism but rather to show how it worked for one man, Gentile da Foligno" (1). "Its purpose [of this book] is to explore scholastic medicine through Gentile's writings" (296, n. 44).

Gentile's major writing, composed over most of his working life, from about 1315 until about 1345, was a detailed commentary of some three or four million words on one of the most important collections of medical treatises, the Canon of Medicine by the Persian polymath Ibn Sina, Avicenna to the Latin world (980-1037). The Canon is an immense encyclopedia of medicine of about a million words, a codification of the whole of ancient and Muslim medical knowledge. The book remained supreme for six centuries, i.e., down to the seventeenth century. The book was highly organized and useful for teaching, once expounded by commentators.

French's book is divided into six chapters and an appendix. In the first, the author looks at the general circumstances of formal schools, especially incorporation and teaching. This provided access to the texts and helped provide them. It also involved the culture of the classroom. In chapter 2, he examines the most inclusive technique of teaching, the commentary, and Gentile's commentary, in particular. In chapter 3, the author investigates how Gentile developed the fundamental principle on which all medicine rested, viz., the theory of complexions, based on the actions of the elementary qualities. This was the substance of his scholastic medicine. Chapters 4 and 5 show how this substance was used. Even practical medicine in Gentile's time was a theoretical affair, and we see how the author elaborated rules of procedure to guide the practitioner through treatment. In particular, chapter 5, over 200 folios, investigates Gentile's speciality, eye diseases. The final chapter 6 examines how doctors offered adv ice to important and distant patients and learned about diseases from other doctors, specifically about the Black Death that arrived in Europe from Genoese trading centers located on the Black Sea in 1347 and wreaked havoc over most of Europe until 1350, thereby reducing the population by one-third.

In the appendix, French lists many remedies, mostly from Gentile's commentary on the Canon. "The purpose of the list is to make possible a reconstruction of the purposes of the doctor in prescribing his medicines" (297).

What makes medicine "canonical"? First, it refers to the title of Avicenna's work "The Canon of Medicine." "A 'canon' was something law-like, a set of rules for doing a thing correctly: not only to achieve the best end, but in accordance with the authority that laws have" (12). The analogy with legal canons is obvious, the standard work by Gratian (fi. Ca. 1140) being called The Concordance c/Discordant Canons. Secondly, it suggests the whole complex of theoretical considerations that became known as the Aristotelian view of the universe based upon careful study of his writings on logic, physics, psychology (soul), and natural philosophy, which, over time, became canonical, i.e., authoritative. "Scholasticism in medicine and natural philosophy became canonical in the universities of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries" (274).

Professor French had the task of explaining the theoretical basis of Gentile's medical work and he also had to show how Gentile exercised his medical theory as a practicing physician. This reviewer congratulates Professor French on a difficult and important task well executed.