152 THE LIFE AND LEGEND OF MICHAEL SCOT 



a physician. Considering indeed the place he held 

 about the Emperor's person, and the high estimation 

 in which his master held him, it seems not at all 

 improbable that his may have been the hand which 

 drew these wise enactments, or his at least the 

 suggestion which commended them to Frederick. 

 They must in any case have been the rules under 

 which he carried on his work as a doctor of medicine. 



This branch of Michael Scot's activity relates 

 itself easily and naturally to what we already know 

 of his acquirements and familiarity with the Arabian 

 authors. It was from the De Medicina of Rases 

 that he borrowed so much material for his Physio- 

 nomia. The Abbreviatio Avicennae too, which he 

 translated for Frederick in 1210, was in no small 

 part a treatise on comparative anatomy and physio- 

 logy, nor is it likely that he can have missed read- 

 ing the famous canon of the same author, in which 

 Avicenna expounds a complete body of practical 

 medicine. We need not wonder then to find that, 

 on Scot's return to court, his work on Averroes 

 done, he added the practice of physic to his duties 

 as Imperial Astrologer. This new profession must 

 have offered itself to him as another means of 

 securing a general forgetfulness of the question- 

 able direction in which his philosophical studies 

 had lately carried him. 



He seems in fact to have won almost as much 

 fame in medicine as he had made for himself in the 

 study of mathematics. Lesley says ' he gained much 

 praise as a philosopher, astronomer, and physician.' 

 Dempster speaks of his ' singular skill,' calling 

 him ' one of the first physicians for learning ' 



1 Historia Ecclesiastica, xii. 495. Dempster professed at Pisa and 

 Bologna between the years 1616 and 1625. 



