Medicine in Medieval England, by C. H. TALBOT, London, Oldbourne, 1967, pp. 222, 35s. Od. The author of this book, Dr. Talbot, is medievalist at the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine. He has produced a book which will appeal to both expert and non-expert-medical or otherwise. The book is a hardback of 222 pages with a table of contents, an index and a bibliography, which lists books...

to poor priests and scholars, corrodarians, and a staff of craftsmen is seen not as the perversion of charity to the deserving poor but rather as its extension. Fifth, the medieval hospital is firmly established as a major type of religious house-one that from now on will have to be given a considerable place in any synoptic study of music, education, architecture, and a number of other topics ...

INCE ITS PUBLICATION IN 1975, David Lindberg’s Theories of Vision from Al-Kind to Kepler 2 has become the canonical ı̄ source for our understanding of medieval optics and its place in the development of modern optics. Lindberg’s ulterior purpose in writing this book was to show that, contrary to prevailing opinion, Johan Kepler’s account of sight, which is based on the casting of point-bypoint i...

In 1276 Giles of Rome compared sperm’s effect on menstrual blood to the work of an artist carving idols from wood.2 His modification of a famous argument by Plato, later taken up by Aristotle, is highly original and points to an important junction of theories about human procreation and theories of artistic creation. Aristotle drew analogies between divine, natural, and artisanal creation with ...

Animals and products derived from different organs of their bodies have constituted part of the inventory of medicinal substances used in various cultures since ancient times. The article reviews the history of healing with animals in the Levant (The Land of Israel and parts of present-day Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, defined by the Muslims in the Middle Ages as Bilad al-Sham) in the medieval an...

Throughout history, opium has been used as a base for the opioid class of drugs used to suppress the central nervous system. Opium is a substance extracted from the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum L.). Its consumption and medicinal application date back to antiquity. In the medieval period, Avicenna, a famous Persian scholar (980-1037 AD) described poppy under the entry Afion of his medical enc...

DRUG ADDIcTIoN, especially through the use of poppy (Papaver somniferum Linn.) and hemp (Cannabis sativa Linn.), is the main concern of this paper. Although the use of these two plants in medieval Islam was extensive, yet little has been written on this timely subject by historians of medicine and pharmacology. Consulting contemporary original sources, it is my hope to sketch a history of their...