The University of New Mexico
NEWS RELEASE
Contact: Carolyn Gonzales 277-5920, 249-4669, cgonzal@unm.edu
Nov. 4, 2005
Surgery in the Middle Ages Focus of UNM Medieval Studies Seminar
A panel of North America's foremost experts on the history of medicine will gather in Albuquerque on Friday and Saturday, Nov. 18 - 19 for “Blades and Blood: Surgery and Anatomy in the Middle Ages and Beyond,” the University of New Mexico Institute for Medieval Studies' fourth annual medieval science and medicine seminar.
The event, which will take place in Room 122 of Northrop Hall on UNM's main campus, will include five illustrated presentations and a concluding discussion. All seminar sessions are free and open to the public.
The overall aim of the seminar is to consider how techniques of surgery developed from rudimentary medieval beginnings into a means for the social advancement of gifted physicians in the Renaissance period while also examining key ways in which early developments contributed to the emergence of modern medicine. Individual presentations will show:
• how medieval surgeons incorporated an ever more sophisticated knowledge of anatomy into their textbooks, their teaching, and their surgical practice;
• how Jewish learning and Jewish physicians played a crucial role in the evolution of Western medicine during the Middle Ages;
• how the tradition of anatomical illustration developed and changed, yet remained partly the same, in its long evolution from late Antiquity to the pre-modern era;
• how the development of women's medicine and the study of human generation as a separate medical field was intimately associated with the emergence of the science of dissection;
• how Renaissance surgeons created spectacular new surgeries to advance their careers and bring themselves into the social limelight.
All presentations will be enhanced with colorful and graphic illustrations from medieval manuscripts and early printed books to offer a striking visual perspective on the relative importance attached to tradition and innovation as the theory and practice of surgery and anatomy advanced and changed.
“The special value of the seminar will lie in the unusual opportunity it offers for direct communication between the humanities and the sciences. The presenters will cover their topics in a manner that will appeal directly to specialists and the general public alike. Scientists and humanities scholars will exchange ideas and observations directly and members of the public will have the opportunity to participate in this dialogue,” said Tim Graham, director, UNM Institute for Medieval Studies
For more information on this seminar or on the Institute for Medieval Studies, call 277-2252 or visit the Institute's website at www.unm.edu/~medinst.
The lectures:
Friday, Nov. 18, 7 p.m.
Michael C. McVaugh, “What Good Was Anatomy to a Medieval Surgeon?”
McVaugh will deliver an overview of the relationship between surgery and anatomy in the medieval period while considering the interaction between these two crucial areas of the medical sciences and broader social and educational changes. As the Middle Ages advanced, the theory and practice of surgery became more self-consciously rational, and by the later thirteenth century medieval surgeons began to incorporate sections on anatomy in their textbooks and to teach the subject to their disciples. But what did they think was important about anatomy? How did they try to convey anatomical knowledge, verbally and visually, and how did they use that knowledge? McVaugh's lecture will address these questions by looking closely at the writings of three key individuals: Guglielmo da Saliceto (1275), Lanfranc of Milan (1296), and Henri de Mondeville (1304–6). He will conclude by looking at the incorporation of anatomy into academic medicine in France and Italy during the fourteenth century.
Saturday, Nov.19, 9 a.m.
David A. Bennahum, “Science and Medicine in the Jewish Communities of the Middle Ages”
Bennahum will demonstrate that during the Middle Ages, Jewish centers of Talmudic study played an important role in the preservation and transmission of Greek and Arabic medicine. In many towns and cities across Europe, Jewish physicians treated Christian patients and served as important sources of scientific knowledge to the Christian community. Major Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides (1135–1204) may have been instrumental in spreading the influence of Aristotle on such key Christian thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and may also have assisted in encouraging the evolution of the medieval university. Increasing prejudice against Jews, however, created barriers to Jewish-Christian dialogue, especially after the outbreak of bubonic plague in the fourteenth century. Bennahum will discuss medicine as learned and practiced by Jewish physicians in the medieval period and will consider possible links to the general growth of scientific knowledge.
Saturday, Nov. 19, 10:15–11:15 a.m.
Ynez Violé O'Neill, “Ariadne's Thread: The Visual Tradition of Anatomy”
Anatomical illustration has a fascinating history that casts important light on the manner anatomy developed and on the kinds of visual paradigms that influenced practitioners of anatomy. O'Neill's lecture will follow the intriguing thread of continuity that winds through the labyrinthine paths of medieval anatomical development, focusing especially on the visual and plastic aspects of the tradition. She will trace a number of conventional anatomical figures from the earliest survivals through to their last vestiges, which date from the eighteenth century. What was the starting point for these visual traditions? What do their alterations and variations imply? Do the illustrations offer clues about the moving force behind inquiry into human structure in pre-modern Europe? While acknowledging that it is impossible to offer complete answers to these questions, Professor O'Neill will cast some light down a few dark corridors.
Saturday, Nov. 19, 11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m.
Katharine Park, “‘The Secrets of Women': Anatomy and Dissection in Renaissance Italy”
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, medical writers and philosophers began to devote attention to what they called “women's secrets,” by which they meant matters pertaining to female sexuality and generation. At about the same time, Italian physicians began to open human bodies in order to learn and teach about their structure and function. Park will demonstrate that these two developments were closely related and reflect important changes in women's healthcare. Using both texts and images, her lecture will show that one of the principal goals of the new practice of dissection was to illuminate the workings of the female reproductive system and that the opening of the uterus came quickly to symbolize the appropriation of previously inaccessible realms of knowledge on the part of learned physicians.
Saturday, November 19, 2 p.m.–3 p.m.
William Eamon, “Stupendous Surgery and Renaissance Self-Fashioning”
“Self-fashioning” is one of the classic characteristics associated with the Italian Renaissance. Eamon will argue that for some healers of the Renaissance period, surgery offered a mechanism for “self-fashioning” and for social advancement. For these surgeons, the art of surgery was not merely a way to mend bones, treat wounds, and heal chancres, as traditional surgery had been, but an opportunity to exploit and demonstrate “stupendous surgeries” that would bring them into the public limelight. Eamon's presentation will focus mostly on the sixteenth-century Italian surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti and four of his “stupendous surgeries”: splenectomy, rhinoplasty, a new treatment for head wounds, and a “marvelous” balm for treating gunshot wounds. Fioravanti successfully employed these new techniques to showcase his skills and advance his career.
Saturday, November 19, 3:15 p.m.–4 p.m.
Panel discussion
The seminar concludes with a panel discussion when the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions of the speakers and other experts sitting on the panel.
The lecturers:
Michael C. McVaugh is the William Smith Wells Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. One of North America's leading experts on the history of medicine in the pre-modern period, his special field is the development of medical learning within the university setting during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the concomitant “medicalization” of European life. He is the general editor of the project to publish the complete writings of Arnau de Vilanova (d. 1311), one of the greatest medieval physicians. Professor McVaugh is the author of Medicine before the Plague: Doctors and Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285–1335 . He is currently writing a general account of the development of medieval surgery. A former recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Professor McVaugh has been a Visiting Fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford, a Research Associate of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, and in 1994 was awarded the William H. Welch Medal by the American Association for the History of Medicine.
David A. Bennahum is Professor of Internal Medicine at UNM's Health Sciences Center. After receiving his doctorate at the University of Geneva, he trained at Roosevelt and Presbyterian Hospitals in Hew York City and was Chief Resident and a Fellow in Rheumatology at the University of New Mexico. He has a longstanding interest in the humanities as they pertain to patients and physicians and teaches courses in “Ethics, Law, and Policy,” “The History of Medicine,” “The History of Public Health,” and “Literature and Medicine.” He is the past chair of the Biomedical Ethics Committee at the Health Sciences Center. The author of numerous articles, his most recent publication is “Historical Reflections on Medicine and War,” published in the Cambridge Quarterly of Health Care Ethics .
Ynez Violé O'Neill is Research Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 1997 until 2000, she was President of the International Society of the History of Medicine. Her research has focused on the history and illustrations of pre-modern medicine, with a special focus on the social, cultural, and institutional factors that influenced the development of medicine. The author of more than one hundred research articles, encyclopedia entries, and reviews, she published her book Speech and Speech Disorders in Western Thought before 1600 in 1980. She is currently completing Anatomy—The Western Oddity , a study of the development of the anatomical sciences from the earliest times to the advent of dissection in the West.
Katharine Park is the Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science and of the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the history of European science and medicine in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance; she has a special interest in the development of women's medicine and the history of dissection. Professor Park is the editor of volume 3 of The Cambridge History of Medicine . She is the author of Doctors and Medicine in Renaissance Florence (1985) and (with Lorraine Daston) of Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (1998). Her latest book, Women's Secrets: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection , will be published in 2006.
William Eamon is Regents Professor of History and Director of the Honors College at New Mexico State University. A specialist in the history of medicine and science, he is the author of Science and the Secrets of Nature (1994), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and received the History Book Award of the Association of American Publishers. His forthcoming book, The Charlatan's Tale: A Renaissance Surgeon's World , examines the life and career of the Italian surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti (1517–1588?), inventor, entrepreneur, and reformer. In 2004 Professor Eamon was selected as New Mexico State University's S. P. and Margaret Manasse Chair, a research appointment that will enable him to complete Science and Everyday Life in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1750 (under contract to Cambridge University Press) and to host an international conference on “Beyond the Black Legend: Spain and the Scientific Revolution.”
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