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bib23103 (22 / November / 2024)

Darrera modificació: 2018-05-08
Bases de dades: Sciència.cat, Arnau

McVaugh, Michael R., "Determining a drug's properties: medieval experimental protocols", Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 91/2 [=Testing Drugs and Trying Cures, ed. Elaine Leong i Alisha Rankin] (2017), 183-209.

Resum
Among Galenic texts attracting attention circa 1300 was De complexionibus, which described a crude protocol for determining the qualitative character and intensity of any given medicine. This caught the attention of physicians at Montpellier, where three generations of writers made it into a carefully structured test procedure for identifying by a via experimenti the nature of a drug's effect on healthful function: they introduced a null point as the referent for their measurements, identified a range of contingent factors that had to be controlled for, and devised ways to standardize the sample being tested. Their protocol was certainly designed to be used, but in practice they seemed to have preferred an alternative via rationis that inferred the effect of a medicine from sensory attributes like taste and color, acknowledging that taste tests were coarser and less certain than a structured experimental procedure, but were easier and quicker to perform than the elaborate alternative.
Matèries
Història de la medicina
Medicina - Farmacologia
Vilanova, Arnau de
Notes
Basat sobretot en obres d'Arnau de Vilanova i Bernat de Gordon.
URL
https:/​/​muse.jhu.edu/​article/​665486
What are the images?

The small images on the decorative ribbon correspond, from left to right, to the following documents: 1. James II orders the settlement of neighborhood disputes over an estate of the royal doctor Arnau de Vilanova in the city of Valencia. 1298 (ACA); 2. Contract between Guglielmo Neri de Santo Martino, a surgeon from Pisa, and the physician-surgeon from Majorca Pere Saflor, bachelor of medicine, to practise medicine and surgery under the latter’s direction, 1356 (ACM); 3. Valuation of the workshop of Guillem Metge, an apothecary from Barcelona, made by the apothecaries Miquel Tosell, Berenguer Duran and Vicenç Bonanat, for its sale to Llorenç Bassa, a fellow apothecary, 1364 (AHPB); 4. Peter III the Ceremonious regularizes the legal situation of Esteró, a Jewish female doctor from Vilafranca del Penedès, granting her an extraordinary license to practice medicine. 1384 (ACA); 5. Power of attorney of Margarida de Tornerons, a doctor in Prats de Molló and Vic, in order to recover the goods withheld from her by a third party in Vic, 1401 (ABEV); 6. Doctorate and teaching license of Narcís Solà, bachelor of medicine, issued by Bernat de Casaldòvol, doctor of medicine and chancellor of the Faculty of Medicine in Barcelona, 1526 (AHCB); and 7. Partnership between Joan Llunes and Joan Francesc Llunes, father and son, and Lluís Gual, the former’s son-in-law, surgeons of Caldes de Montbui, in order to practise the profession, 1579 (AHCB).