Medicine and the Italian Universities, 1250-1600

Book excerpt: This volume collects essays published in the last 20 years. They deal with medicine in the university world of thirteenth to sixteenth century Italy, discussing both the internal academic milieu of teaching and learning and its relation to the lively urban social, economic, and cultural context in which medieval and Renaissance Italian university medicine grew up. Topics covered include the complex interaction of continuity and change in the transition from scholastic to humanistic medicine; humanist presentations of medical lives; the activities of physicians who moved among the worlds of academic learning, princely courts, and city life; the teaching of practical medicine; the relations of medical and surgical learning and practice; and the influence on medical writing of a variety of elements in the broader surrounding intellectual culture.