During the early modern period, the emergence of what ultimately became modern science took place mainly in Latin, the international language of educated discourse of the era. Hundreds of thousands of scientific texts were published in Latin from the invention of print around 1450 to the demise of Latin as a language of science around 1850. Despite its importance, our knowledge of this literature is extremely limited. This book aims to provide an overview of this area, the first ever to be written. It does so, not from the perspective of a natural scientist or a historian of science, but of a literary scholar. Instead of the scientific content or methodology of the respective works, it focusses on the genres of scientific literature and their communicative functions. Latin Scientific Literature, 1450-1850 falls into two main parts. The first part ('Contexts') introduces four aspects of early modern intellectual culture which are crucial for an understanding of the scientific literature of the time: the development of science, the role of Latin, the concept of literature, and the rise of print. Part two ('Texts'), offers an overview of Neo-Latin scientific literature. Subsumed under five communicative functions - disclosing sources, presenting facts, arguing for certain positions, summarizing knowledge, and publicizing science - twenty pertinent genres are discussed.

Medical texts written in English during the late Middle Ages have in recent years attracted increasing attention among scholars. From approximately 1375 onwards, the use of English began to gain a firmer foothold in medical manuscripts, which in previous centuries had been written mainly in Latin or French. Scholars of Middle English, and editors of medical texts from late medieval England, are thus faced with a huge medical vocabulary which no single volume has yet attempted to define. This dictionary is therefore an essential reference tool. The material analysed in the Dictionary of Medical Vocabulary in English, 1375–1550 includes edited texts, manuscripts and early printed books, and represents three main types of medical writing: surgical manuals and tracts; academic treatises by university-trained physicians, and remedybooks. The dictionary covers four lexical fields: names of sicknesses, body parts, instruments, and medicinal preparations. Entries are structured as follows: (1) headword (2) scribal variants occurring in the texts (3) etymology (4) definition(s), each definition followed by relevant quotations (5) references to corresponding entries in the Dictionary of Old English, Middle English Dictionary, and The Oxford English Dictionary (6) references to academic books and articles containing information on the history and/or meaning of the term.

This unique examination of medieval medicine as detailed in physician's manuals of the period reveals a more sophisticated approach to the medical arts than expected for the time. Far from the primitive and barbaric practices the Middle Ages may conjure up in our minds, doctors during that time combined knowledge, tradition, innovation, and intuition to create a humane, holistic approach to understanding and treating every known disease. In fact, a singularly authoritative medical source of the period, Lily of Medicine, continued to provide crucial study for students and practitioners of medicine almost four centuries after its completion in 1305. This unprecedented book investigates the extensive capabilities of physicians who relied on practice, observation, and imagination before the supremacy of mechanistic views and technological aids. Medieval Medicine: The Art of Healing, from Head to Toe is a comprehensive look at diseases as they were described, classified, explained, assessed, and treated by doctors of the age. The author methodically compares a dozen encyclopedic manuals in which both the fundamental understanding of healthy functions and the specific response to diseases were summarized, viewing the information through a medieval perspective rather than based upon modern criteria.

Classification is an important part of science, yet the specific methods used to construct Enlightenment systems of natural history have proven to be the bête noir of studies of eighteenth-century culture. One reason that systematic classification has received so little attention is that natural history was an extremely diverse subject which appealed to a wide range of practitioners, including wealthy patrons, professionals, and educators. In order to show how the classification practices of a defined institutional setting enabled naturalists to create systems of natural history, this book focuses on developments at Edinburgh's medical school, one of Europe's leading medical programs. In particular, it concentrates on one of Scotland's most influential Enlightenment naturalists, Rev Dr John Walker, the professor of natural history at the school from 1779 to 1803. Walker was a traveller, cleric, author and advisor to extremely powerful aristocratic and government patrons, as well as teacher to hundreds of students, some of whom would go on to become influential industrialists, scientists, physicians and politicians. This book explains how Walker used his networks of patrons and early training in chemistry to become an eighteenth-century naturalist. Walker's mineralogy was based firmly in chemistry, an approach common in Edinburgh's medical school, but a connection that has been generally overlooked in the history of British geology. By explicitly connecting eighteenth-century geology to the chemistry being taught in medical settings, this book offers a dynamic new interpretation of the nascent earth sciences as they were practiced in Enlightenment Britain. Because of Walker's influence on his many students, the book also provides a unique insight into how many of Britain's leading Regency and Victorian intellectuals were taught to think about the composition and structure of the material world.

Wounds were a potent signifier reaching across all aspects of life in Europe in the middle ages, and their representation, perception and treatment is the focus of this volume. Following a survey of the history of medical wound treatment in the middle ages, paired chapters explore key themes situating wounds within the context of religious belief, writing on medicine, status and identity, and surgical practice. The final chapter reviews the history of medieval wounding through the modern imagination. Adopting an innovative approach to the subject, this book will appeal to all those interested in how past societies regarded health, disease and healing and will improve knowledge of not only the practice of medicine in the past, but also of the ethical, religious and cultural dimensions structuring that practice.

In three sections, the Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. It explore medical developments and trends in writing history according to period, place, and theme.

Medical writing tells us a great deal about how the language of science has developed in constructing and communicating knowledge in English. This volume provides a new perspective on the evolution of the special language of medicine, based on the electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, containing over two million words of medical writing from 1500 to 1700. The book presents results from large-scale empirical research on the new materials and provides a more detailed and diversified picture of domain-specific developments than any previous book. Three introductory chapters provide the sociohistorical, disciplinary and textual frame for nine empirical studies, which address a range of key issues in a wide variety of medical genres from fresh angles. The book is useful for researchers and students within several fields, including the development of special languages, genre and register analysis, (historical) corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, and medical and cultural history.

Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine details the whole scope of scientific knowledge in the medieval period in more than 300 A to Z entries. This resource discusses the research, application of knowledge, cultural and technology exchanges, experimentation, and achievements in the many disciplines related to science and technology. Coverage includes inventions, discoveries, concepts, places and fields of study, regions, and significant contributors to various fields of science. There are also entries on South-Central and East Asian science. This reference work provides an examination of medieval scientific tradition as well as an appreciation for the relationship between medieval science and the traditions it supplanted and those that replaced it. For a full list of entries, contributors, and more, visit the Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages website.