Old-Time Makers of Medicine: The Story of The Students And Teachers of the Sciences Related to Medicine During the Middle AgesWalsh, James J. (James Joseph)
History
Old-Time Makers of Medicine: The Story of The Students And Teachers of the Sciences Related to Medicine During the Middle Ages
Walsh, James J. (James Joseph)
Medicine, Medieval; Physicians
Just how the lack of interest in medical education for women gradually
deepened, until there was almost a negative phase of it, only a few
women in Italy devoting themselves to medicine, is hard to say. It is
one of the mysteries of the vicissitudes of human affairs that ups and
downs of interest in things practical as well as intellectual keep
constantly occurring. The number of discoveries and inventions in
medicine and surgery that we have neglected until they were forgotten,
and then had to make again, is so well illustrated in chapters of this
book, that I need only recall them here in general. It may seem a little
harder to understand that so important a manifestation of interest in
human affairs as the education and licensure of women physicians should
not only cease, but pass entirely out of men's memory, yet such
apparently was the case. It would not be hard to illustrate, as I have
shown in "Cycles of Feminine Education and Influence" in "Education, How
Old the New" (Fordham University Press, 1910), that corresponding ups
and downs of interest may be traced in the history of feminine education
of every kind. In that chapter I have discussed the possible reasons for
these vicissitudes, which have no place here, but I may refer those who
are interested in the subject to that treatment of it.
IX
MONDINO AND THE MEDICAL SCHOOL OF BOLOGNA
The most important contributions to medical science made by the Medical
School of Salerno at the height of its development were in surgery. The
text-books written by men trained in her halls or inspired by her
teachers were to influence many succeeding generations of surgeons for
centuries. Salerno's greatest legacy to Bologna was the group of
distinguished surgical teachers whose text-books we have reviewed in the
chapter, "Great Surgeons of the Medieval Universities." Bologna herself
was to win a place in medical history, however, mainly in connection
with anatomy, and it was in this department that she was to provide
incentive especially for her sister universities of north Italy, though
also for Western Europe generally. The first manual of dissection, that
is, the first handy volume giving explicit directions for the dissection
of human cadavers, was written at Bologna. This was scattered in
thousands of copies in manuscript all over the medical world of the
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Even after the invention of
printing, many editions of it were printed. Down to the sixteenth
century it continued to be the most used text-book of anatomy, as well
as manual of dissection, which students of every university had in hand
when they made their dissection, or wished to prepare for making it, or
desired to review it after the body had been taken away, for with lack
of proper preservative preparation, bodies had to be removed in a
comparatively short time. Probably no man more influenced the medical
teaching of the fourteenth and fifteen centuries than Mundinus, or, as
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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