Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
curricula, which had focused on the seven liberal arts and the study of the
Bible. Despite this, when medicine did become part of the university cur-
ricula, it was quickly accepted as a highly revered discipline. In this set-
ting 'academic physicians' had to distinguish themselves from 'lay'
medical practitioners, who continued to provide major medical care for
people well into the eighteenth century. In particular, they distinguished
themselves through their knowledge of the nature and causes of diseases
and health - hence the English term 'physicke' for medicine up to the
eighteenth century. This knowledge was largely based on Galen's theory
of humors, from which the diagnostic capacities of urine as an indicator
of humoral imbalance derived. Thus, when it came to the academic phy-
sicians choosing an emblematic representation for their field - each of
the seven liberal arts had a long established emblem or visual symbol
(Lindgren 1992) - they chose the symbol of uroscopy: a man holding up
and examining a glass flask filled with urine, a so-called 'matula'.
Although we still know little about medieval visual culture, there is
some evidence for the early development and use of this emblem. Since
late antiquity, outside of the Islamic world, illustrations were frequently
used in medical texts for entertainment rather than for demonstration
(Grape-Albers 1977, Zotter 1980). Typically, written medical recipes and
treatments were illustrated by a physician handing over a vessel of medi-
cine to his patient. Because that image strongly resembles the later depic-
tions of uroscopy, where a patient hands over a matula to the physician,
it is very likely that this motif is the iconographical origin of the symbol
of uroscopy. Moreover, there was a well-developed medieval Christian
art of decorating the Bible with colorful miniatures of Bible stories in the
margin or within the enlarged first letters of each chapter. That art was
also applied to the earliest Latin translations of Arabic and Greek medi-
cal texts such as Avicenna's
Canon medicinae
, the
Articella
(a digest of
Galen), and what was known as the
Aphorisms of Hippocrates
. In all of
these early Latin manuscript translations we find miniatures representing
the practice of uroscopy in prominent places (see Figures 2a and b).
3
3
According to Zglinicki (1982, pp. 23-24), the oldest known uroscopy image is in the
twelfth-century manuscript
Regulae urinarum
by Maurus and Urso of Salerno.
