Ancient medical texts, modern reading problems

Abstract

Key words: plague treatises -Jacobi-Kamintus's treatise -textual transmission -textual tradition -early printingtextual modernizationIn this paper I will try to show that the attested differences among copies of an ancient text was due in part to distinct needs and expectations of the intended audience, and are not, as commonly stated, a necessary result from a poor work in a printing house. For this, I will focus on one of the first known medical works printed in Portuguese, the Regimento proueytoso contra ha pestenença (1496?). Regimento parallels other medical works, and this paper turns its attention to two of them, A Moche profitable treatise against the Pestilence (1534), and Recopilaçam das cousas que conuem guardar se no modo de preseruar à Cidade de Lixboa E os sãos, & curar os que esteuerem enfermos de Peste (1580). The first two treatises are unequivocally part of the same textual tradition, but the same is not true to the third of them, in spite of the fact that Recopilaçam had some of the versions of Regimento as part of its sources.The next section outlines some characteristics of the three treatises. A discussion follows the comparison. MATERIALS AND METHODSNowadays the Portuguese Regimento survives in two copies of the same edition, printed in Lisbon at the end of the XV century by Valentim Fernandes, a German printer who worked in Portugal from 1495 to 1518 (Rosa 1994). One of the copies stands in the Public Library at Évora, and the other, in the library of the ducal palace at Vila Viçosa, both in Portugal.According to Roque (1979), the prime source for the Portuguese Regimento would be the medieval work De pestilentia, written by Johannes Jacobi, a doctor who lived in Montpellier by the XIV century. However, the Portuguese edition, as many others, presents the bishop Roque (1979), Raminto would have established a "syncretical text", the Tractatus de regimine pestilentico, a work in which he added some parts of Jacobi's work, and omitted others.The Regimento proueytoso contra ha pestenença is a translation from Latin, and a translation for a layman distant about a century from Jacobi. Friar Luiz de Raz ( † 1521?), the translator, occupied the Chair of Natural Philosophy at the University of Lisbon, and was a lecturer of Theology at the same University. It is difficult to imagine him as someone whose Latin knowledge was poor, as sometimes has been supported (see Roque 1979 RESULTSRegimento has five chapters in the following order: the prognosis of pestilence, its causes, the remedies against it, the fortifiers (or confortations) of the heart and other organs, and the last chapter, on bloodletting. The English edition has the five chapters present in the Portuguese edition, although the fifth chapter is not numbered and precedes three other parts not numbered, absent from the Portuguese edition: To knowe urine, A remedy for the frenche pockes, and a codicil entitled To the reder.The Portuguese version has no section on urine; besides, it shows a comment on the misleading diagnosis

Improving the use of historical written sources in paleopathology

“…This means that a text may include diseases, operations, or other treatments no longer relevant to the time of its writing. We must be acutely aware of the tradition of medical authorship in a past society if we are to use the information found in their medical texts (Rosa, 2006).…”