Medical Books in the Byzantine World

EIKASMOS Quaderni Bolognesi di Filologia Classica Studi Online, 2 MEDICAL BOOKS IN THE BYZANTINE WORLD EDITED BY BARBARA ZIPSER BOLOGNA 2013 Medical books in the Byzantine world edited by BarbaraZipser Bologna 2013 o Eikasmós Online II ISSN 2282-2178 In memoriam David Bennett y Table of Contents Acknowledgments . vii List of figures. .xi List of abbreviations . xii 1. Prefatory note: the uses of medical manuscripts Peregrine Horden (RHUL and Oxford). .1 2. Byzantine medicine, genres, and the ravages of time Vivian Nutton (UCL) . 7 3. Disease and where to treat it: a Byzantine vade mecum Dionysios Stathakopoulos (KCL) . 19 4. Two Latin Pre-Salernitan medical manuals, the Liber passionalis and the Tereoperica (Ps. Petroncellus) Klaus-Dietrich Fischer (Mainz) . 35 5. The fate of a Greek medical handbook in the Medieval West: the Intro- duction, or the Physician ascribed to Galen Caroline Petit (ICS) . 57 6. Aristotle and the Caliph's Dream. Aspects of medical translations David Bennett (formerly NHS and RHUL) . 79 7. `Syriac' plant names in a fifteenth century Greek glossary (From the Wellcome Library Books and Manuscripts) Nikolaj Serikoff (Wellcome Library). .97 8. The Reception of Galen's Art of medicine in the Syriac Book of medicines Siam Bhayro (Exeter) . 123 9. Medieval hospital formularies: Byzantium and Islam compared Peregrine Horden (RHUL and Oxford) . 145 10. Cancerous cells, Neanderthal DNA and the tradition of Byzantine medicine. Textual criticism in philology and genomics Florian Markowetz (Cancer Research UK Cambridge and University of Cambridge) and Barbara Zipser (RHUL) . 165 Acknowledgements This volume originates from a conference on Byzantine Medical Manuals in Context, held in central London on the 19th of September 2009. The conference, which was jointly organized by Peregrine Horden and Barbara Zipser, formed part of a three year project on Byzantine Medical Manuals: Construc- tion and Use based at the Department of History at Royal Holloway University of London. First and foremost we would like to thank the Wellcome Trust for funding the project (grant no. 039752) and the conference (089306), and the RHUL Department of History for providing a supplementary grant for the conference. The volume was copy edited by Barbara Packard. Peregrine Horden helped with various proofs. The Wellcome Library kindly allowed us to publish a photograph of MSL 60. Caroline Buckley provided two illustrations. We are honoured to be published by Eikasmós,and also extend our thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers and the editors. Last but not least we would like to thank speakers, chairs and audience at the conference, and all those who discussed the topic with us in other settings. Barbara Zipser, RHUL xi List of figures Cover illustration: Caroline Buckley Figure 1: Wellcome Library, London, MSL 60, f. 71v . 121 Figure 2: Illustration: Caroline Buckley . 177 xii List of abbreviations ANRW { Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt APAW { Abh. d. Königl.Preuß. Akademie d. Wiss. BECh { Bibliothèque de l'Ecole´ des Chartes BMCRev { Bryn Mawr Classical Review BRL { Bulletin of the John Rylands University of Manchester Library ByzZ { Byzantinische Zeitschrift DOP { Dumbarton Oaks Papers G&R { Greece and Rome HR { History of Religions JOByz¨ { Jahrbuch der Osterreichischen¨ Byzantinistik JHS { Journal of Hellenic Studies JRA { Journal of Roman Archaeology JAOS { Journal of the American Oriental Society JWI { Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes M&S { Medicina e Storia MedSec { Medicina nei Secoli P&P { Past and Present PAA { Prakt. >Akad. >Aj. PG { Patrologia Graeca REByz { Revue des Etudes Byzantines RSO { Rivista degli Studi Orientali StudMed { Studi Medievali WO { Die Welt des Orients Prefatory note: the uses of medical manuscripts Much of this collection of articles concerns medical texts that seem emi- nently `practical' or ùseful'.1 But what does either of those adjectives mean? How can historians of medieval Greek medicine, usually working on writings that now lack contextual evidence of origins and application, establish criteria of usefulness or practicality? Those who study medical remedies of the pre-modern period are often asked { by `lay', non-specialist audiences in par- ticular { `did they work?' The question usually presupposes a certain kind of effectiveness as the yardstick: that of modern, laboratory-based biomedicine with its high levels of pain relief { on which yardstick medieval remedies generally fall short, proving neutral at best.2 In the same way, the question put (in effect) to scholars of medieval medical manuscripts { `were they used?' { presupposes a certain vision of the texts' Sitz im Leben as providing the sole criterion.3 In effect, if the text did not sit in the consulting room, and if it was not frequently in the doctor's hand, at least between patients and perhaps during a consultation, it was not practical or useful. What follows is a short statement of the obvious contrary position. Just as there are many kinds of effect and effectiveness that can be ascribed to remedies,4 so there are many kinds of usefulness with respect to medical texts. In each case we need to 1 The conference from which it derives was indeed conceived as a collective study of Byzantine medieval manuals, or iatrosophia (for the definition of which see Nutton's contribution in this volume). In what follows I am grateful throughout for advice from Barbara Zipser and Nigel Wilson. 2 See e.g. B. Brennessel-M.D.C. Drout-R. Gravel, A Reassessment of the Ef- ficacy of Anglo-Saxon Medicine, Cambridge 2006, 183-195. 3 To borrow a term from Biblical form criticism. 4 E. Hsu, Medical Anthropology, Material Culture, and New Directions in Medical Archaeology, in P.A. Baker-G. Carr (edd.), Practitioners, Practices and Pa- tients: New Approaches to Medical Archaeology and Anthropology, Oxford 2002, 1-15, 2 HORDEN separate out the different kinds to arrive at a suitable typology, and we need to try to arrive at criteria for each kind { ideally, in the case of texts, related to aspects of the manuscripts in which we find them. The starting point must be that the production of a manuscript { either to create a text or texts for the first time or to copy an existing exemplar { had some perceived value in the Byzantine world. Nigel Wilson has shown that, in the middle Byzantine period, the cost of a manuscript of some 400 folios was the equivalent of several months' salary for a low-ranking civil servant. That cost included the production of the writing materials as well as the copyist's skill and time.5 We need not worry here about the exact period or the exact salary. The point is the order of magnitude. In simple terms of price, the modern equivalent to producing or commissioning a manuscript was, shall we say, buying a small car. It was not the equivalent of buying a modern hardback volume. The best evidence of the preciousness of parchment or vellum is its re-use { the palimpsest. Witness, most strikingly for us today, the codex containing three `new' texts of Archimedes.6 Thus, a medical manual such as that of John the Physician, 90 folios including pinax in one quarto manuscript, might have cost our civil servant one month's salary.7 Even such a iatrosophion, when copied on vellum, required a number of hides from sheep or goats (hardly more than four folia per animal)8 and would have taken several months to write out. And when various types of paper became generally available as a substitute writing material from the eleventh to twelfth century onwards, it was not, at least to begin with, very much cheaper in the Byzantine empire.9 So it can be taken as axiomatic in this context that no text was suggests that we substitute `was it successful?' (in meeting patients' expectations) for `did it work?' (in relieving symptoms or pain) as our main question. 5 N. Wilson, Books and Readers in Byzantium, in Byzantine Books and Book- men, Washington DC 1975, 3f., with C. Mango, The Availability of Books in the Byzantine Empire, A.D. 750-850, ibid. 38f. 6 The Archimedes Palimpsest, ed. R. Netz et al., I-II, Cambridge 2011. 7 B. Zipser, John the Physician's Therapeutics. A medical Handbook in ver- nacular Greek, Leiden-Boston 2009, 18. This estimate is based on manuscript M, the only complete witness of the text. 8 Wilson, Books and Readers cit. 2. 9 R.S. Bagnall, Early Christian Books in Egypt, Princeton-Oxford 2009, ch. 3, for the costs of papyrus rolls and codices; J. Bloom, Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic World, New Haven-London 2001. Prefatory Note: The Uses of Medical Manuscripts 3 written out, no copy made, automatically { without some calculation, however rapid, however subconscious, of costs and benefits: the cost of the material, the benefit of the text or texts that it might already bear (in the case of a palimpsest), the benefit of the text or texts that might be written on it. With the Archimedes manuscript, the value of the writing material, the lack of alternative sources of parchment, and the Palestinian scribe-priest's need for a copy of a prayer book clearly trumped any need felt to preserve mathematics or philosophy from pagan antiquity. That is why, more generally, we find the filling up of blank pages or half pages in manuscripts: such spaces were a waste of a rare and costly medium. Of course, we always have to bear in mind that we are generalising about what survives, not what once existed { about which we can only conjecture.10 Crossings out, or other signs of editing, are unusual in the codices that have come down to us because for the most part only `fair copies', finished products and their derivatives have been preserved.11 (At least in the medical sphere, not even the ancient and late antique papyri have revealed anything much that could be identified as rough draft or working copy.)12 We presume that authors or compilers, or those re-working some earlier material, roughed out their texts on papyrus off-cuts, slates, ostraca, or individual palimpsest sheets of parchment.

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