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Good Humour, Good Health

7 bytes removed, 22:30, 22 October 2021
<nomobile>[[File:Rembrandt - The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp.jpg|thumb|Only once it became acceptable to dissect human corpses for anatomical research was it possible to discover that Galen wasn't always right.<br>{{small|By Rembrandt van Rijn (1632)}}]]</nomobile>
<mobileonly>[[File:Anagni 2.JPG|thumb|left|Yet another infographic illustrating the relations between elements and seasons (outer circles), and humours and stages of human life (inner circles enclosing a human figure). This one comes from the 13th century and can be found on the ceiling of a crypt in the cathedral of Anagni, Italy. On the wall below you can see Hippocrates (ca.&nbsp;460&nbsp;BCE – ca.&nbsp;360&nbsp;BCE) conferring with Galen (129&nbsp;CE – ca.&nbsp;216&nbsp;CE).]]</mobileonly>
Like much of the achievements of the Greco-Roman civilisation, Galenic medicine will be largely forgotten after the fall of the western part of the Roman Empire, but will survive in its Byzantine part, from where whence it will be gleaned by the Arabs and from them, by the Persians. A man who will make the greatest contributions to further develop the theory will live in 11th-century Uzbekistan under the name Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Abdillah ibn al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Sina (or '''Avicenna''' for short). In the following century, the medical knowledge preserved and expanded by the Muslims, will filter back into western Europe thanks to, among others, '''Constantine the African''', who will bring it from Tunisia to Salerno, Italy. It's in Salerno where Europe's first medical school will be located and where Greek medical texts will be translated from Arabic and Hebrew, the chief languages of medicine. This is how Galen, along with "his" humoral theory, will be rediscovered in Europe and popularised among aristocrats by such court physicians as '''Michele Savonarola''' (his better-known grandson, Girolamo, will study medicine too, but then he's going to quit his studies and get busy with religion and politics instead). Finally, in the 1470s, Bartolomeo Sacchi (better known as '''Platina''') will publish the first ever printed cookbook, ''De honesta voluptate et valetudine'' (''Of Honest Pleasure and Good Health''), which will introduce wider European populace to recipes marrying the pleasure of eating and humoral medicine.
<mobileonly>[[File:Rembrandt - The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp.jpg|thumb|Only once it became acceptable to dissect human corpses for anatomical research was it possible to discover that Galen wasn't always right.<br>{{small|By Rembrandt van Rijn (1632)}}]]</mobileonly>
In the 16th century, after the discoveries made by da Gama, Columbus and others, Europeans will finally realize realise that if ancient authorities got it wrong about geography, then it's possible they also got it wrong about other things. It will be the time of the first medics to question Galenic theory, with Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (or '''Parecelsus''' for short) at the helm. Two years after his death, though, all works of Galen will be finally published in print, in the Greek original, leading to new translations and a renewed interestest interest in Galenism. By mid-17th century, with European book market finally saturated with humoral medical-dietary handbooks, Galen's authority will have been thrown into doubt once again, following the discoveries of the likes of Andries van Wesel (or '''Vesalius''', who will prove Galen wrong about the structure of human heart), '''William Harvey''' (who will discover that veins and arteries form a closed circuit) and '''Jan Baptist van Helmont''' (who will show that digestion is due to gastric acids and not to an "inner heat"). But all that is not say that humoral dietetics will have been completely forgotten.
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