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Darrera modificació: 2018-09-12
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat
Gibbs, Frederick Williams, Poison, Medicine, and Disease in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Abingdon - Nova York, Routledge, 2019, 314 pp.
- Resum
- This book presents a uniquely broad and pioneering history of premodern toxicology by exploring how late medieval and early modern (c. 1200–1600) physicians discussed the relationship between poison, medicine, and disease. Drawing from a wide range of medical and natural philosophical texts—with an emphasis on treatises that focused on poison, pharmacotherapeutics, plague, and the nature of disease—this study brings to light premodern physicians' debates about the potential existence, nature, and properties of a category of substance theoretically harmful to the human body in even the smallest amount. Focusing on the category of poison (venenum) rather than on specific drugs reframes and remixes the standard histories of toxicology, pharmacology, and etiology, as well as shows how these aspects of medicine (although not yet formalized as independent disciplines) interacted with and shaped one another. Physicians argued, for instance, about what properties might distinguish poison from other substances, how poison injured the human body, the nature of poisonous bodies, and the role of poison in spreading, and to some extent defining, disease. The way physicians debated these questions shows that poison was far from an obvious and uncontested category of substance, and their effort to understand it sheds new light on the relationship between natural philosophy and medicine in the late medieval and early modern periods.
- Matèries
- Història natural
Història de la medicina
Medicina - Farmacologia
- Notes
- Conté:
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Classical Authorities and Traditions
The ambiguity of pharmaka and venena
Prevention, symptoms, and remedies
Medical pharmacotherapy and theories of poison
Compilation, synthesis, and specific form
Conclusion
2. Poison and Venom in the Latin West before 1300
Poisons and venoms in translation
Encyclopedic poisons
Qualities, quantities, and forms
Regulating poisonous drugs
Conclusion
3. Towards a New Toxicology
Food, medicine, and poison
A new kind of poison text
New "problems" of poison
Patronage, poison, and medical learning
Conclusion
4. Plague, Poison, and Metaphor
Putrefied and poisoned air
Plague as poison in the body
Spreadable and contagious poison
Conclusion
5. Poisonous Properties, Bodies, and Forms
Occult definitions and forms
Poisonous properties
Poisonous bodies
Poisoning, sorcery, and the evil eye
Sympathetic forms
Conclusion
6. Poison, Putrefaction, and Ontology of Disease
Poisons, contagions, and the French Disease
Poison as cause of disease
Separating poison and medicine with Paracelsus
Ontologies of poisons, forms, seeds, and disease
Conclusion
7. Reframing Toxicology
Reconciling the language of medicine and poison
New approaches to venenum
Poisons, venoms, and corruptions in the body
Conclusion
Epilogue
Bibliography
- URL
- https://www.routledge.com/Poison-Medicine-and-Disea ...
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