niccolo leoniceno --1/29/25

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Today's selection-- from Andreas Vesalius and His Fabrica,1537-1564  by Vivian Nutton. Niccolo Leoniceno and the faint glimmers of the coming revolution in medicine during the fifteenth century:

“Nonetheless, much of the medicine of antiquity long remained hidden from those who called themselves humanists, for one simple reason: most of the ancient medicine that had survived the centuries had been written in Greek. Greek was rarely studied at school until the early years of the sixteenth century and access to Greek medical texts was limited even among those who could read them, for Greek manuscripts were hard to find even in Italy. The Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453 had brought about a change, for many Greek refugees fled to Venice, bringing Greek texts with them. Wealthy patrons like the Medici in Florence or the Greek Cardinal Bessarion, who had strong links with Venice, set about collecting manuscripts for their libraries, sending envoys to the Aegean region to seek out long-forgotten treatises as well as employing their own copyists. Crucially important in this search for ancient Greek medicine was the long-lived Niccolo Leoniceno (1428- 1524). Born and educated in Vicenza and with a prodigious reputation for his linguistic skills, he took a medical degree at Padua. Of his visit to Northern Europe in 1453, we know little except that he visited Oxford with an Englishman he had met in Padua and was forced to drink wine by the over-exuberant clients of a Dutch bar. He may have taught medicine and philosophy for a while at Padua before moving to the university of Ferrara, where, save for occasional periods of teaching in Bologna, he stayed until his death. He was so much an institution there that it was said that winter began when he put on a cap, and summer when he removed it.

“His home university of Ferrara, ever since its foundation in 1391, had been a pioneer of the new humanist learning, in deliberate contrast to the more traditional Padua and Bologna. The Este rulers were intent on increasing their reputation as patrons of culture and made their city and its university one of the major intellectual centres of Europe for more than a century and a half. Leoniceno and his passion for the language, literature and medicine of the ancient Greeks fitted perfectly into this new society, attracting students from Northern Italy and beyond. As well as his university teaching, he was paid from time to time as a ducal physi­cian, and between 1470 and 1490 he was occupied in translating for Duke Ercole many of the ancient historians, particularly from the Greek, as well as the humorous Dialogues of Lucian and the modern Roma Instarata of Flavio Biondo. Some of these he turned into Latin, but many also into Italian, most of them, alas, now lost or preserved only in manuscript. He was on friendly terms ,with leading humanist scholars such as Urceus Codrus in Bologna, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Politian in Florence (whose ruler Lorenzo de' Medici made tentative approaches to obtain his services as a household physician), and, above all, with the printer Aldus Manutius and his circle of Hellenists in Venice.

“By 1490, Leoniceno had acquired the largest collection of Greek medical and scientific writings in all of Europe. At his death, he owned at least 75 Greek codices, many composed of multiple treatises by a variety of authors and encompassing works by almost all the classical medical writers known today. He made good use of them in his own writings. Speaking in 1491 in a debate before the court at Ferrara, he set out a novel manifesto that, when it was published by a local printer the next year, caused a sensation. Its title, De Plinii et aliorum in medicina erroribus, The Mistakes of Pliny and Others in Medicine, gave only a slight hint of its power to subvert, for this was a wholesale attack on the basis of all Latin medicine from Late Antiquity onwards. In it, Leoniceno argued that the Latin texts that every modern doctor studied were filled with innumerable errors because of the complex process of the transmis­sion of the sources on which they drew. The multitude of translators, the different routes these earlier writings had taken, and the variety of languages involved, Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew and several varieties of Latin, to say nothing of the vagaries of copyists and the misunderstandings of readers, had led to errors of all kinds. To take but two examples, the names of plants and diseases were confused and misunderstood. Pliny had thought 'leucographis' was a plant, although the Greeks Dioscorides, Galen and Paul had described it as a mineral, and he had mistaken the herb 'struthius' for its homonym, a bird. The major Arabic authors, Avicenna and the pharmacologist Sarapion, were taken similarly to task for errors whose consequences could be seen in the fallible productions of those who confected pills and other remedies, as Leoniceno did not fail to point out as he walked the streets of Ferrara. These mistakes were not simply the fault of medieval scribes: even the Roman Pliny had made many errors in transliterating plant names from the Greek botanists into Latin. Only by returning to the original Greek of Galen and the botanist Dioscorides could one be sure of the actual meaning of the words that they had used and, consequently, of the validity of the principles that depended on them and had been inculcated for so long.

"There were many others who followed Leoniceno's example, collecting Greek manuscripts and translating them into Latin, including the Englishman Thomas Linacre (1460-1524), physician and tutor in the English royal household and one of the founders of the London Collegeof Physicians in 1518. These 'hellenisers' argued that many of the texts of medieval medicine, and especially those taken from the Arabic, were filled with errors that derived from a misunderstanding or miscopying of the original words of the Greeks, especially Galen and Hippocrates. If only one could return to the original sources, understand and translate them correctly, and even add to their number by bringing to light treatises that had remained for centuries unnoticed among Greek manuscripts, then one would have a much clearer and sounder basis for the principles and practice of medicine. Confusion would be swept away through philological exactitude, and one would indeed have brought about a rebirth of medicine. These new medical standards, enforced throughout medicine by universities and colleges of graduate physicians, would, it was argued, ultimately benefit all mankind.

“These claims ,widely trumpeted in Italy, were accepted only slowly North of the Alps, for two related reasons. They depended on a knowl­edge of ancient Greek, something rarely studied in schools or universities even within Italy before 1500, and, equally important, on access to Greek books and, particularly, Greek manuscripts. Only one ancient Greek medical writer, the botanist-pharmacologist Dioscorides, had been printed in full, in 1499, and only two of the many writings of the most prolific of all ancient writers, Galen, had been published in their original Greek, The Method of Healing and the smaller Method of Healing, for Glaucon, in 1500. Neither appears to have circulated widely outside Northern Italy. The situation was a little different when translations into humanist Latin began to be published at the end of the century. Printers played safe, publishing modern translations direct from the Greek of a handful of basic texts that were read by all medical students, and often printing them alongside the older versions. (This was not foolish, for earlier medieval writers, and not a few contemporary lecturers, used the older translations and cross-checking with live new versions in a separate publication was cumbersome at best.) As Leonhard Schmaus, a doctor from Salzburg, no German backwater, angrily complained in 1519, it was no use saying that one could gain more solid learning from a day reading Galenilian from a whole week of Avicenna, when editions and translations were few and far between, or available in only a few major cities.”

author:	Vivian Nutton
title:	Andreas Vesalius and his Fabrica, 1537-1564: Changing the World of Anatomy (Palgrave Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine)
publisher:	Palgrave
pages:	9-12