The ArgumentBy the beginning of the fourteenth century, medicine had acquired a cultural role in addition to its traditional functions as a therapeutic art. Medical subject matter infiltrated the religious discourse via the new thirteenth-century encyclopedic literature. Preachers came to employ in their moral analogies a wider range of medical topics, using sophisticated medical examples and citations attributed to recognized medical authorities. These developments coincided with the growing prestige of medicine as an academic discipline.

The ArgumentIn this paper I try to analyze the fate of a new medical model that was developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in European Latin society, particularly in the southern parts of Latin Europe. This model won the approval of the communities in which it was developed as part of an incipient network of medical care and attention. The new healer (Christian and male )that emerged from this model, whether physician or surgeon, based his practice on his knowledge (...) of Aristotelian natural philosophy. He was an intellectual and a social product fashioned and supported by traditional and new urban leader groups, whether civil or ecclesiastic, Christian or Jewish. Health and healers were considered part of the urban social organization both in large cities and in smaller towns.Full social acceptance of this new model was achieved only after heated debate. In practice, the new way of conceiving of medicine did not begin to become socially accepted outside intellectual circles until the new healer was able to offer specific solutions for the maintenance or restoration of health, both at an individual and at a collective level, and according to the criteria and feelings of the leader groups of the society of that time.Progress in research allows us to identify nene factors, at least, that were involed in the construction of these novelties in late medieval Latin society. (shrink)