The Loss and Recovery
of Greek Medicine in the West
After the fall of the Roman Empire in the
5th century, most works of the Greek physicians were lost to Western
Europe.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, however, Western
Europeans began to rediscover Greek scientific and medical texts.
This was due in part to the discovery of Arab repositories of
learning in Spain and elsewhere during the Crusades as well as
the immigration to Italy of Byzantine scholars at the fall of
Constantinople in 1453.
At first Greek theories, prescriptions, and
procedures were accepted as medical dogma about human anatomy,
physiology, and treatment. Later, however, the Greeks entreaties
to their readers to observe the human body and the world around
them won out, and scholars began to perform their own research,
leading to much of the medicine practiced in the West today
Ibn al-Nafis,
Ali ibn Abi al Hazm. Sharh tab¯i'at al-ins¯an
[li-Buqr¯at]. Commentary on Hippocrates' treatise "On
the nature of man". [S.l., 1269].
It was through manuscripts such as this thirteenth-century
Arabic work on Hippocrates that many Western Europeans first began
to learn about Greek medicine again.
Early Printing
of Greek Medical Texts
A great deal of Europes knowledge of
Greek medicine and culture entered Europe through Italy in the
fifteenth century. Not long after the invention of printing in
the 1450s, Aldo Manuzio (1452-1516), also known as Aldus Manutius,
began editing and printing Greek authors in their original language
by finding the best manuscript texts available and creating new,
highly legible Greek fonts.
His early editions of Hippocrates, Aristotle,
Dioscorides, and other Greek authors marked the first time that
many of them had been printed and helped establish their places
in the European cultural canon.
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