Greek Medicine 125 



Arabic, Gerard of Cremona (died 1185), who turned many 

 medical works into Latin from Arabic, and who was followed 

 by a whole host of imitators. Yet more important for the 

 advance of medicine, however, was the learned revival of the 

 thirteenth century. In the main that revival was based on 

 translations from Arabic, but a certain number of works were 

 also rendered direct from the Greek. During the thirteenth 

 century Aristotle's scientific works began to be treated in this 

 way, but more important for the course of medicine were those 

 of Galen, and they had to wait till the following century. The 

 long treatise of Galen, Trept xP et/cts T & v * v o-vdp^Trov crcu/xari /^opiW, 

 On the uses of the bodily parts in man, was translated from 

 the Greek into Latin by Nicholas of Reggio in the earlier 

 part of the fourteenth century. This work, with all its 

 defects, was by far the best account of the human body then 

 available. Many manuscripts of the Latin version have sur- 

 vived, and it was translated into several vernaculars, including 

 English, and profoundly influenced surgery. The rendering 

 into Latin of this treatise, and its wide distribution, may be 

 regarded as the starting-point of modern scientific medicine. 

 Its appearance is moreover a part of the phenomenon of the 

 revived interest in dissection which had begun to be practised 

 in the Universities in the thirteenth century, 1 and was a generally 

 accepted discipline in the fourteenth and fifteenth. 2 



Until the end of the fifteenth century progress in anatomy 

 was almost imperceptible. During the fifteenth century 



1 Dissection of animals was practised at Salerno as early as the eleventh 

 century. 



2 The sources of the anatomical knowledge of the Middle Ages are dis- 

 cussed in detail in the following works : R. R. von Toply, Studien zur 

 Gescbichte der Anatomic im Mittelalter, Vienna, 1898 ; K. SudhofT, Tradition 

 und Naturbeobachtung, Leipzig, 1907 ; and also numerous articles in the 

 Archiv fur Geschicbte der Medizin und Naturwissenscbaften ; Charles Singer, 

 ' A Study in Early Renaissance Anatomy ', in Studies in the History and 

 Method oj Science, vol. i, Oxford, 1917. 



