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
In the story of the cure of Saul's blindness Luke says in the Acts that
his blindness fell from him like scales. The figure is a typically
medical one. The word for fall that is used is, as was pointed out by
Hobart ("Medical Language of St. Luke," Dublin, 1882), exactly the term
that is used for the falling of scales from the body. The term for
scales is the specific designation of the particles that fall from the
body during certain skin diseases or after certain of the infectious
fevers, as in scarlet fever. Hippocrates and Galen have used it in many
places. It is distinctively a medical word. In the story of the vision
of St. Peter, told also in the Acts, the word _ecstasis_, from which we
derive our word ecstasy, is used. This is the only word St. Luke uses
for vision and he alone uses it. This term is of constant employment in
a technical sense in the medical writers of St. Luke's time and before
it. When the other evangelists talk of lame people they use the popular
term. This might mean anything or nothing for a physician. Luke uses one
of the terms that is employed by physicians when they wish to indicate
that for some definite reason there is inability to walk.
In the story of the Good Samaritan there are some interesting details
that indicate medical interest on the part of the writer. It is Luke's
characteristic story and a typical medical instance. He employs certain
words in it that are used only by medical writers. The use of oil and
wine in the treatment of the wounds of the stranger traveller was at one
time said to indicate that it could not have been a physician who wrote
the story, since the ancients used oil for external applications in such
cases but not wine. More careful search of the old masters of medicine,
however, has shown that they used oil and wine not only internally but
externally. Hippocrates, for instance, has a number of recommendations
of this combination for wounds. It is rather interesting to realize
this, and especially the wine in addition to the oil, because wine
contains enough alcohol to be rather satisfactorily antiseptic. There
seems no doubt that wounds that had been bathed in wine and then had oil
poured over them would be likely to do better than those which were
treated in other ways. The wine would cleanse and at least inhibit
bacterial growth. The subsequent covering with oil would serve to
protect the wound to some degree from external contamination.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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