Arnaldi De Villanova Opera Medica Omnia De Amore Heroico De Dosi Tyriacalium Medicinarum

Medical Humanities may be broadly conceptualized as a discipline wherein medicine and its specialties intersect with those of the humanities and social sciences. As such it is a hybrid area of study where the impact of disease and healing science on culture is assessed and expressed in the particular language of the disciplines concerned with the human experience. However, as much as at first sight this definition appears to be clear, it does not reflect how the interaction of medicine with the humanities has evolved to become a separate field of study. In this publication we have explored, through the analysis of a group of selected multidisciplinary essays, the dynamics of this process. The essays predominantly address the interaction of literature, philosophy, art, art history, ethics, and education with medicine and its specialties from the classical period to the present. Particular attention has been given to the Medieval, Early Modern, and Enlightenment periods. To avoid a rigid compartmentalization of the book based on individual fields of study we opted for a fluid division into multidisciplinary sections, reflective of the complex interactions of the included works with medicine.

This book deals with the work of one of the most famous medical scholars of the middle ages, renowned to his contemporaries as being able to see more deeply into the theory of medicine than anyone else. It is based in particular on an analysis of his huge commentary on Avicenna's Canon, the biggest and most important single medical text of the Middle Ages. This is the first modern analysis of the commentary, and while the size and elaborate scholastic structure of it has deterred historians, it remained an important text for two centuries. This book explains the nature and purposes of medical scholasticism, which reached its height in the half century before the Black Death, in which Gentile died.

Emotions and Health, 1200-1700 examines the Aristotelian and Galenic understandings of the ‘passions’ or ‘accidents of the soul’ as alterations of both mind and body across a wide range of medieval and early modern cultural discourses: Aquinas’s Summa, canonization inquests, medical and natural philosophical texts, drama, and the London Bills of Mortality. The essays in this collection focus on notions such as death from sorrow, physiological explanations of fear, physicians’ advice on the harmful and beneficial effects of anger and of sex, medical and philosophical constructions of the melancholic subject, and theological and medical discussions on the impact of music in moderating the passions and maintaining health. Contributors include: Nicole Archambeau, Elena Carrera, Penelope Gouk, Angus Gowland, Nicholas E. Lombardo, William F. MacLehose, Michael R. Solomon and Erin Sullivan.

What is love? Popular culture bombards us with notions of the intoxicating capacities of love or of beguiling women who can bewitch or heal—to the point that it is easy to believe that such images are timeless and universal. Not so, argues Laine Doggett in Love Cures. Aspects of love that are expressed in popular music—such as “love is a drug,” “sexual healing,” and “love potion number nine”—trace deep roots to Old French romance of the high Middle Ages. A young woman heals a poisoned knight. A mother prepares a love potion for a daughter who will marry a stranger in a faraway land. How can readers interpret such events? In contrast to scholars who have dismissed these women as fantasy figures or labeled them “witches,” Doggett looks at them in the light of medical and magical practices of the high Middle Ages. Love Cures argues that these practitioners, as represented in romance, have shaped modern notions of love. Love Cures seeks to engage scholars of love, marriage, and magic in disciplines as diverse as literature, history, anthropology, and philosophy.

Toxicology in Antiquity is the first in a series of short format works covering key accomplishments, scientists, and events in the broad field of toxicology, including environmental health and chemical safety. This first volume sets the tone for the series and starts at the very beginning, historically speaking, with a look at toxicology in ancient times. The book explains that before scientific research methods were developed, toxicology thrived as a very practical discipline. People living in ancient civilizations readily learned to distinguish safe substances from hazardous ones, how to avoid these hazardous substances, and how to use them to inflict harm on enemies. It also describes scholars who compiled compendia of toxic agents. Provides the historical background for understanding modern toxicology Illustrates the ways ancient civilizations learned to distinguish safe from hazardous substances, how to avoid the hazardous substances and how to use them against enemies Details scholars who compiled compendia of toxic agents