They and their colleagues have successfully dated and localized more precisely dozens of landmark manuscripts preserving eleventh– and twelfth–century medicine. One key was to combine the skills of historians with those of paleographers, specialized scholars who study the history of book hands and the production of manuscript books. The other was to use the new digital technologies of image production and transfer to bring together a large enough set of data (more than 450 medical manuscripts of the period survive) to allow systematic comparison of a wide body of material manuscript evidence. The late 11th and 12th centuries were a pivotal moment in the history of Western medicine: the point when learned medical practitioners in Europe first began systematically to retrieve earlier Greek writings on medicine and to adopt the sophisticated medical theories and practices from the Islamic world. This period laid the foundations for what would become scientific medicine in the West. That this transition happened has long been known. But its precise details— explaining which texts were most important, and which ones circulated where— Meeting " reinvented our understanding of medical manuscripts " in the High Middle Ages Medievalists.net 

"Salvatore De Renzi’s mid-19th century, five volume work, Collectio Salernitana ossia documenti inediti, e trattati di medicina appartenenti alla scuola medica salernitana, 5 vols, Naples 1852-1859, has stood for 150 years as the foundation for most understandings of what “Salernitan” medicine was in the 12th century. Yet that study was based on an essentially random survey of extant manuscripts (MSS) that had come to the notice of De Renzi or his collaborators. In many instances, no early MSS were known or consulted. This study presents preliminary results from a survey of all extant MSS dating from the “long” twelfth century (c. 1075-c. 1225) that contain Latin medical texts. Surveying the 375 MSS identified as of 2008, it is argued that four different corpora can be discerned. These largely circulated in separate patterns, which suggests that they came out of and reflected different centers of genesis. These were: (1) the early medieval corpus: this includes texts of late antique and early medieval origin, including various epistulae ascribed to Hippocrates, works coming out of late antique North Africa (like Theodorus Priscianus, Vindician, Muscio), and Alexander of Tralles. These MSS tended to come out of peripheral centers (France, Germany, etc.). (2) The “eleventh-century Renaissance corpus”: under this rubric I put both new translations from the Greek (Paul of Aegina, Philaretus, Theophilus) and substantial re-editing of older Latin material (the Dioscorides alphabeticus, the adaptations of the old gynecological corpus as well as the new, abbreviated editions of the Metrodora text, De passionibus mulierum, and Gariopontus’s mid-11th century Passionarius). MSS including these texts seemed only rarely to incorporate any of the older materials. (3) The Constantinian corpus: most of Constantine’s corpus enjoyed fairly wide circulation in the 12th century, making it all the more notable that the Salernitans’ embrace of him seems to have been late and slow. Although readily placed amid other texts of the 11th-century Renaissance, Constantine’s works never seemed to be found with Salernitan texts until the end of the 12th century. (4) The Salernitan corpus: I differentiated between theoretical works (under which heading I mostly put the Articella commentaries), which circulate early and broadly, and the works of praxis, which almost universally show up only late in the century and then usually only in N. French and English copies. Exceptions to this pattern are the Practica of Bartholomeus and the Chirurgia of Roger Frugardi (which, I argue, is indeed associated with Salerno). I argue that these findings throw into question the traditional tendency to connect all medical production of the central Middle Ages with Salerno. Of the 11th-century corpus, only Gariopontus’s and Alfanus’s works are demonstrably Salernitan. Moreover, I suggested that the still inadequately studied Antidotarium magnum was not necessarily of Salernitan origin but may have come from elsewhere in southern Italy. Finally, I concluded that other 11th- and 12th-century productions also merited analysis, including the anatomical and cautery series that resurfaced around this time, and such recent works as the ‘Macer floridus’, De viribus herbarum. I also noted what was not on the list: any copies of Gerard of Cremona’s (d. 1187) substantial medical output from Toledo, save for one copy of the Urtext of the Liber ad Almansorem (which might not be Gerard’s work) and one copy of Avicenna’s Canon. A Table was included listing all Salernitan texts whose earliest extant copies or attestations seemed to come from Anglo-Norman areas."

This lecture and accompanying workshops started with the inventories of three physicians and used their libraries to talk both about the changing culture of learned medicine in the high Middle Ages, but also about the ways the new riches in digitization allow us to move from single physical manuscripts to reconstructed libraries and intellectual milieus. We focused on the libraries of "Johannes," an Italian medical scholar of the late 12th century; Richard de Fournival, a French cleric and physician (d. 1260); and Astruc de Sestiers, a Jewish physician who died in 1439. Comparing these inventories with medical manuscripts in Harvard's collections, we can see not simply the overlapping worlds of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish physicians, but also common changes in medical culture that transcended linguistic divides. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic635929.files/GreenPosterBig.pdf Included as a second attachment here is the HANDOUT from the workshops, presented on 26 Feb 2015.

Included in the original publication are translations of the following texts: I. Biography of Constantine the African by Peter the Deacon (12th cent.) II. Trota (?), obstetrical excerpts from the Salernitan Compendium, On the Treatment of Diseases (12th cent.) III. Mattheus Platearius (attributed), Circa instans (12th cent.; excerpts) IV. Copho (attributed), Anatomy of the Pig (12th cent.) V. Medical Licenses from the Kingdom of Naples a) License for Bernard of Casale Santa Maria (1330) b) License to practice surgery for Maria Incarnata (1343)

Medical libraries spread mainly in the modern age, but there are also remarkable examples before, in the first half of the fifteenth century. Generally, from the 11th to the 16th century, the Latin translators of Greek doctors made a great contribution to medicine, because they improved medical knowledge providing new texts for academic teaching, which influenced medical practice. In my paper, I aim at reconstructing the libraries or sources of the Latin translators from Greek of ancient medical texts, from the 12th to the 14th century: Burgundio of Pisa, Bartholomew and Stephan of Messina, Wilhelm of Moerbeke, Peter of Abano, and Nicholas of Reggio. The evolution of medical collections will be highlighted, as well as some crucial aspects of the transmission of medical texts will be placed in historical context.

The press release from the National Humanities Center (NHC) documented the findings of a major symposium held at Research Triangle Park, NC, in Fall 2010, "Excavating Medicine in a Digital Age: Paleography and the Medical Book in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance." An international gathering of paleographers and historians of medicine over the question of how to untangle numerous questions about the transformation of European medicine from a landscape of scattered survivals from late antiquity that presented no coherent view on medical thinking or practice, into a unified system grounded on the adoption of principles of Galenic medicine from Arabic sources. It had long been clear that these events happened over the course of the "long 12th century" (roughly 1075 to 1225 CE), but the precise events and influences remained to be determined, in large part because so much evidence -- the extant manuscripts themselves -- had been neither dated nor localized. A focal point of the symposium was works coming out of the monastery of Monte Cassino, where an immigrant translator, Constantinus Africanus (Constantine the African), worked in the last quarter of the 11th century, translating more than two dozen medical treatises from Arabic into Latin. In the course of the symposium, it was slowly realized that a manuscript now in the Hague (Koninklijke Bibliothek, MS 73 J 6) was very likely a direct product of Monte Cassino, copied while Constantine (d. before 1098/99) would have been working there. This press release was originally posted on the NHC webpage: https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/newsrel2010/prrevmedicine.htm. That link has now been broken, so I am posting the text of the original release here, for archival purposes.

This short essay (1) explains methods for researching the history of medical ideas in medieval Europe, which usually involves examination of medical texts; and (2) the history of medical practices and practitioners, which can be researched both through medical texts and a variety of other sources. On the former topic, I also address three problem areas in working with medical manuscripts: (a) the absence of any single dictionary devoted to medieval medical terminology; (b) the variety (and often, inconsistency) of technical abbreviations used in medical texts; and (c) the relationship between medical texts and the images that accompany them. The bibliography presented here is heavy on sources for England since at the time that's where the heaviest investment had been made in finding aids. Since 2005, an enormous number on online resources has become available. For an updated assessment of the general field of medieval medical history research, see Monica H. Green, “Integrative Medicine: Incorporating Medicine and Health into the Canon of Medieval European History,” History Compass 7, no. 4 (June 2009), 1218-45, doi: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x.