The texts of Avicenna and Averroes are not known in the West before the thirteenth century. However, the Latin scholars have access, before this date, to some of the thoughts of Greek and Arabic authors, notably due to the translations of Constantine the African in the eleventh century. These translations, mostly of medical texts, push Latin doctors of the following century to take a closer look at philosophy, especially since the texts then available make medicine a part of natural philosophy. For the rest, it is the thought of the twelfth century on the whole that aims to replace the study of the human body, and so its diseases, in a global analysis of Creation. This tendency, which develops at a moment where most of the Aristotelian corpus is still unknown, is most prevalent among the doctors of Salerno. The texts studied in this great center of teaching are of Greek or Arabic origin: for example, The Isagoge by Johannitius, the Aphorisms, Prognostics et Regimen of Acute Diseases by Hippocrates, the Medical Art by Galen, or the Pantegni by Constantin, adapted from the al-Kitab al-Malakt by al-Majtisl.
In their commentaries on The Isagoge, the Salernitan masters strive to situate medicine in the general organization of knowledge, while it belongs neither to the trivium nor to the quadrivium. Contra Hughes of Saint-Victor, who around 1120 makes medicine a purely mechanical art, the Salernitan authors divide all knowledge into three branches, logic, ethics, and physics, and place medicine in the latter, with physics and meteorology. Medicine is then considered a full-fledged science, divided itself into theory and practice on the Arabic model.
In this way appears in the West the idea that medicine includes a theoretical part, which is grounded in natural philosophy. The definition of medicine given by
Bartholomew of Salerno (twelfth century) is in this regard emblematic:
> The science of medicine deals with the actions and passions of the elements in mixed bodies. Although it has been invented for the human body, it considers every thing that can change it, as the nature of animals, herbs, trees, spices, metals, stones, because all of them can change the human body.
Medicine has, thus, for most Salernitans, a universal reach, which expresses itself in particular by the use of the term physicus, which designates the doctor-philosopher at Salerno.
But the relation between medicine and philosophy goes even further than this connection established between medicine and natural philosophy. Indeed, the Salernitan and the authors of the twelfth century, such as William of Conches, could not know the zoological works of Aristotle, which had not yet been translated; so they strive, from available texts such as the Physics, On Generation and Corruption but also from the commentary of Plato’s Timeus by Calcidius, to reconstitute a natural philosophy coherent with medical data, in a process that reverses the trend that had until then dominated. This trend ends with doctor Urso of Salerno, who dies around 1200. The latter strives to connect, in one systematic theory, the contributions of medicine and natural philosophy. His thought develops around the question of the elements: Urso tries to show how elements shaped by the Creator from prime matter combine to form the ''elementata’’ in bodies. These ''elementata’’ which can transform under the effect of the interactions between the essential and accidental qualities of the elements that compose them, are at the base of all natural phenomena, in the human body (through the intermediaries of complexions) as in the sublunary world in general. Through his detailed study of the theory of elements, Urso aims to provide a single explanation for natural phenomena that come under medicine or philosophy; his goal is to be an inventor, that is, a founder like Hippocrates was for medicine, to whom the qualifier was traditionally attributed, and to found a new discipline synthesizing contributions of doctors and philosophers. This discipline constitutes, for Urso, the Physica, whose ambition largely exceeds medicine in the strict sense, since its investigations spread to all things in nature.
However, this ambitious project has no immediate sequels in the West for two main reasons: first, the arrival of new translations, notably of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Galen, modify clearly from the beginning of the thirteenth century the idea of the relation between medicine and philosophy; second, the decline of the Salerno school does not permit the pursuit of the intellectual tradition established in the city. Of course, the Salernitan’s works are not completely forgotten and continue to be studied, but the reception of the great philosophical systems provokes important reconsiderations in the West. Many debates on the relation between medicine and philosophy then repeat the terms of the question that Arabic authors had already tried to resolve; but the new conditions of the practice of medicine, and especially its teaching in universities, are eventually going to modify radically this perspective.
World History
