Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1550

Abstract

Have medicine and its close relative, natural philosophy, ever not been visual? ‘The soul’, Aristotle wrote, ‘never thinks without an image’ and by that he meant a sensory image. For doctors and philosophers in the classical tradition, such images were above all visual. Although modern historians of medicine have been confidently informed that their subject is ‘constructed’ through rhetoric, it is as well to remember that medical concepts and procedures are also, in a fundamental way, visualized; on the patient's body and in the patient's behaviour, as well as in the doctor's dress, deportment and actions. This visualization is now of course lost to historians, so that discussion must inevitably focus on the relation between texts and images, of which mere illustration is only one small aspect. It takes a collection of essays such as the one under review to remind us just how various in function the images that we find in European manuscripts and early printed books really were.

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