Gilles de Corbeil (Latin: Egidius de Corbolio or Egidius Corboliensis; also Aegidius) was a French royal physician, teacher, and poet. He was born in approximately 1140 in Corbeil and died in the first quarter of the 13th century. He is the author of four medical poems and a scathing anti-clerical satire, all in Latin dactylic hexameters.
Gilles de Corbeil was born in Corbeil-Essonnes. He studied at the Schola Medica Salernitana, absorbing its theories and practices and becoming a teacher himself. He praises his teachers Romuald Guarna and Peter Musandinus (in turn the student of Bartholomew of Salerno) in his long poem (four books and 4,663 verses) of ca. 1194 on Salernitan drug therapy, De laudibus et virtutibus compositorum medicaminum. [1] [2] He complains, however, of the school's degeneration after the sack of Salerno in 1194 by Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, [3] and in the same poem he criticizes its "granting medical degrees, and consequently a license to lecture, to unlearned and inexperienced youths." [4] [5]
He returned to Paris between ca. 1180 and 1194, [2] becoming a canon and the court physician to Philip II of France. He proudly presented himself as a pioneer of academic medicine in France, upholding the prestige of the Salernitan medicine over rivals such as the Montpellier school and the "empiric" Rigord. [2] The epilogue to De urinis is a particularly bitter denunciation of Montpellier, its vain contentiousness and obliviousness to true science (Latin : Monspessulanicus error), and even its people; one Medieval commentator explains this in terms of an unhappy visit to the city by Gilles. [6] Gilles of Corbeil is the only teacher namely known of the University of Paris where he became a magister in the end of the 12th century. [7]
His brief poems De urinis (352 verses on uroscopy) and De pulsibus (380 verses on Galenic pulsology), based on treatises by Theophilus Protospatharius by way of the Articella, [2] were intended as mnemonic aids for his students to memorize, reflecting his preoccupation with pedagogy. [8] They became didactic classics and were widely studied, copied, and commented upon. [2]
This poem of 2,358 verses, not printed until 1907, deals with the signs and symptoms of humoral excess and diseases (organized from head to foot), proceeding to "sections on gynecological disorders and on whole-body diseases such as arthritis, leprosy, and fevers." [2]
His Laxative for Purging Prelates (Latin : Ierapigra ad purgandos prelatos; a Salerno glossary explains yerapigra literally as "sacred and bitter medicine," sacrum amarum, from Greek ἱερός, often used for a special pharmacological recipe, and πικρός [9] ), a satire in nine books and 5,929 verses, was discovered in 1837 among manuscripts deriving from the library of Pierre Pithou. [10] It particularly targets Guala Bicchieri but takes aim more generally at the abuses prevalent among ecclesiastical officials. [11] In a prologue, the poet invokes, not a Muse, but a pope (apparently Innocent III), from whom he hopes to receive the antidote that can cure the morally sick prelates. [12]
Bartholomaeus Anglicus, also known as Bartholomew the Englishman and Berthelet, was an early 13th-century Scholastic of Paris, a member of the Franciscan order. He was the author of the compendium De proprietatibus rerum, dated c.1240, an early forerunner of the encyclopedia and a widely cited book in the Middle Ages. Bartholomew also held senior positions within the church and was appointed Bishop of Łuków in what is now Poland, although he was not consecrated to that position.
Trotula is a name referring to a group of three texts on women's medicine that were composed in the southern Italian port town of Salerno in the 12th century. The name derives from a historic female figure, Trota of Salerno, a physician and medical writer who was associated with one of the three texts. However, "Trotula" came to be understood as a real person in the Middle Ages and because the so-called Trotula texts circulated widely throughout medieval Europe, from Spain to Poland, and Sicily to Ireland, "Trotula" has historic importance in "her" own right.
The Schola Medica Salernitana was a medieval medical school, the first and most important of its kind. Situated on the Tyrrhenian Sea in the south Italian city of Salerno, it was founded in the 9th century and rose to prominence in the 10th century, becoming the most important source of medical knowledge in Western Europe at the time.
Arnaldus de Villa Nova was a physician and a religious reformer.
Giorgio Baglivi, born Giorgio Armeno and sometimes anglicized as George Baglivi, was a Croatian-Italian physician and scientist. He made important contributions to clinical education, based on his own medical practice. His De Fibra Motrice advanced the "solidist" theory that the solid parts of organs are more crucial to their good functioning than their fluids, against the traditional belief in four humors. Baglivi, however, advocated against doctors relying on any general theory rather than careful observation. He was "a distinguished physiological researcher fascinated by the nerves, his microscopic studies enabled him to distinguish between smooth and striated muscles and distinct kinds of fibres."
Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, Latin: The Salernitan Rule of Health is a medieval didactic poem in hexameter verse. It is allegedly a work of the Schola Medica Salernitana, a medieval medical school in Salerno. This school founded in the 9th century is considered possibly the oldest medical school, in a southern Italian city, which held the most important medical information, the most famous and notable being Regimen santiatis Salernitanum. Nearly 300 copies of this poem are published, in various languages, for medical professionals.
Romuald Guarna was the Archbishop of Salerno from 1153 to his death. He is remembered primarily for his Chronicon sive Annales, an important historical record of his time.
Baron Antoine Portal was a French anatomist, doctor, medical historian and founding president of the Académie Nationale de Médecine.
Urso of Calabria, also Urso of Salerno, Ursus Salernitanus, Urso di Calabria was an Italian scholastic philosopher and significant author of medical works in the school of Salerno. He has been thought the leading figure of the school and its most important theoretician and Aristotelian. He had a European reputation.
Theophilus Protospatharius was the author of several extant Greek medical works. Nothing is known of his life or the time when he lived. He is generally called "Protospatharius", which seems to have been originally a military title given to the colonel of the bodyguards of the emperor of Constantinople (Spatharioi); but which afterwards became also a high court title, or was associated with the government of provinces and the functions of a judge.
Bartholomaeus of Bruges was a Flemish physician and natural philosopher.
Trota of Salerno was a medical practitioner and writer in the southern Italian coastal town of Salerno who lived in the early or middle decades of the 12th century. Her fame spread as far as France and England in the 12th and 13th centuries. A Latin text that gathered some of her therapies was incorporated into an ensemble of treatises on women's medicine that came to be known as the Trotula, "the little book [called] 'Trotula'". Gradually, readers became unaware that this was the work of three different authors. They were also unaware of name of the historical writer, which was "Trota" and not "Trotula". The latter was thenceforth misunderstood as the author of the whole compendium. These misconceptions about the author of Trotula contributed to the erasure or modification of her name, gender, level of education, medical knowledge, or the time period in which the texts were written; this trend often resulted from the biases of later scholars. Trota's authentic work was forgotten until it was rediscovered in the late 20th century.
The Antidotarium Nicolai, also known as the Antidotarium parvum or small antidotarium, was a late 11th or early 12th-century Latin book with about 150 recipes for the creation of medicines from plants and minerals. It was written in the circles of the Schola Medica Salernitana, the center of European medical knowledge in the High Middle Ages. It was based in part on the Antidotarium of Constantine the African, an 11th-century work also written in Salerno which was itself partially a translation of older Arabic works. It has been called "without doubt one of the most influential medical texts in medieval literature", "the essential pharmacopeia of the Middle Ages" and "the bible of medieval practical pharmacy". It was often coupled with the Circa instans, another 12th-century compendium of less complex medicines.
Jean-Joseph Menuret, called Menuret de Chambaud was a French physician and author of a number of medical treatises. He also contributed to the Encyclopédie by Diderot and d'Alembert.
Pierre-Jean Fabre was a French doctor and alchemist. Born in Castelnaudary, France in 1588, he studied medicine in Montpellier, France. He became a practitioner of the iatrochemical medicine of Paracelsus. Beginning in 1610 he practiced medicine in Castelnaudary. He became famous as a specialist in the plague which was particularly severe in central Europe during the Thirty Years' War. Fabre prescribed chemical medications for the treatment of the plague and was at one time the private physician of King Louis XIII of France.
The women of Salerno, also referred to as the ladies of Salerno and the Salernitan women, are a group of women physicians who studied in medieval Italy, at the Schola Medica Salernitana, one of the first medical schools to allow women.
Abd El Razzaq Ibn Mouhammed Ibn Hamadouch Al-Jazaïri, also known as Abd El Razzaq Al-Jazaïri was a 17-18th-century Algerian important Muslim physician and scientist. His most important work was Kachef Eroumouz fi eharh-El-aquakir ou El-alchbab , which is a treatise on medical subject classified in alphabetical order. This book was very successful in Algeria and Maghreb, and more generally throughout all of the arab world, and influenced islamic medicine.
John of St. Giles was an English Dominican friar and physician.
Richard of Wendover was an English cleric and physician.
Ricardus Anglicus was an English doctor and author of medical texts.
