Nancy G. Siraisi

Medicine and Religion c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova

Introduction The Language of the Physicians who Produce Spiritual Texts Medicine as a Vehicle for Religious Speculation Medicine for the Preachers Medicine and Religion: Between Competition and Cooperation Conclusions Appendices Bibliography Index

Medieval Woman's Guide to Health: The First English Gynecological Handbook

Scholars, like politicians, often accentuate simple peripheral problems while ignoring important central ones. More scholarly energy and ink have been spent on whether the writer of a popular 11th-century gynecology treatise was the woman physician of Salerno named Trotula than on the influential text itself. Beryl Rowlands pleasing Medieval Womans Guide to Health goes directly to the central point: it is a 15th-century English Trotula resplendent in bilingual edition, Middle English and modern. It also has 12 black-andx=req- white illustrations of medieval birth scenes, and 16 amusing womb drawings of fetuses in unnatural or dangerous birth presentations. The book is a treasure for modern practitioners interested in medicines estimable past, for historians of medicine, science, and culture, and for feminists. With familiar medieval clinical sophistication, the text considers abnormal menses, prolapsed uterus, impediments to conception, difficult childbirth, inflation of breasts, and leg swelling during pregnancy; and it suggests the baths, salves, potions, pills, and poultices to aid the ailing woman. More surprising subjects are pregnancy tests, fertility tests (who is at fault, he or she?), conception stim¬ ulators and inhibitors, and advice to

Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice.

Western Europe supported a highly developed and diverse medical community in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. In her absorbing history of this complex era in medicine, Siraisi explores the inner workings of the medical community and illustrates the connections of medicine to both natural philosophy and technical skills.