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Les Commentaires de Martin de Saint-Gille sur les Amphorismes Ypocras by Germaine Lafeuille Review by: William D. Sharpe Isis, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Autumn, 1965), pp. 381-382 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/228132 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 18:59 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Isis. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 62.122.73.34 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 18:59:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Les Commentaires de Martin de Saint-Gille sur les Amphorismes Ypocrasby Germaine Lafeuille

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Page 1: Les Commentaires de Martin de Saint-Gille sur les Amphorismes Ypocrasby Germaine Lafeuille

Les Commentaires de Martin de Saint-Gille sur les Amphorismes Ypocras by GermaineLafeuilleReview by: William D. SharpeIsis, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Autumn, 1965), pp. 381-382Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/228132 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 18:59

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Isis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.34 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 18:59:09 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Les Commentaires de Martin de Saint-Gille sur les Amphorismes Ypocrasby Germaine Lafeuille

BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 56-3-185 (1965) 381

iar, Samuel G. Howe (husband of Julia Ward). Here the author has solid pri- mary and secondary source material on which to build, and the writing benefits from his enthusiasm for meliorist en- deavors and his interest in the person- ality of each of the reformers.

Those who are not specialists will find chapters three and four laborious; these deal with the establishment, coun- try by country, of institutions and periodicals concerned with mental de- ficiency. This compilation of data may be useful in initiating more definitive studies, but the material is presented in a dry, cataloguing manner and much of it might be relegated to footnotes and appendices.

The remainder of the book holds a high level of reader interest, and here nearly every chapter could be doubled or tripled in length. In only a few pages, chapter five counts down the re- markable changes after 1870 which, within a generation, transformed a pro- gram directed to the "cure" of the individual defective into one of segre- gation for life of a stratum of social pariahs blamed for overpopulation, poverty, alcoholism, and sexual devia- tion. The author pays little attention to the larger social and cultural issues related to this shift: e.g., the growth of ra.cial segregation.

Historians of clinical medicine will find the sixth chapter satisfying with its careful account of the slow realiza- tion that the catchall term "idiocy" concealed a yet-undetermined number of specific entities: cretinism, mongol- ism, etc. The establishing of' special facilities for the retarded in public schools is covered in brief and some- what uninspired fashion in chapter sev- en. More spirited is chapter eight's outline of the still-debated question of " quantitative determination of intel- lectual adequacy ": the " I. Q." tests of Binet and Simon and the frightening " moron" category originated by Goddard.

Dr. Kanner becomes unduly harsh in chapter nine, admittedly in the face of grave provocation; the very title, " The Eugenic Scare," precludes objective in- vestigation. Popular excitement over

'Jukes and Kallikaks and the passage of steriliiation laws are described vividly but too briefly. The author's impa- tience with these developments leads him to the astonishing statement that, " the less said about the arbitrary orgies of sterilization, castration and outright massacre in Nazi Germany the better." If such episodes are to be pre- vented from recurring, the historian must explore these matters thoroughly; they cannot be put piously out of sight.

The last chapter, " Dawn of a New Era," in extremely sketchy manner, selects as the turning point the dis- covery in 1934 of phenylketonuria; this is followed by a growing liaison be- tween pediatrics and the mental- hygiene movement, the setting up of the Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., Foundation in 1946, the finding of chromosomal abnormalities in mongolism in 1959 and the beginning by the Kennedy ad- ministration in the United States in 1963 of a national program " to combat mental retardation."

The book is handsomely bound and fairly well illustrated, and it is printed on that heavy, glossy paper admired by medical publishers. The absence of footnotes is a severe limitation; bibli- ographies are full but not annotated.

Scholars working in that newly-organ- ized area, the history of the behavioral sciences, will find this study of most direct interest. But general historians concerned with modern cultural and intellectual history also will wish to have it available.

GERALD J. GRUMAN Lake Erie College

Germaine Lafeuille. Les Commentaires de Martin de Saint-Gille sur lesAmphor- ismes Ypocras. (Travaux D'Humanisme et Renaissance, 66.) 388 pp., plts., gloss. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1964.

Dr. Lafeuille presents an elegantly printed and carefully proofread edition of the early French commentaries of Martin de Saint-Gille on Hippocrates' Aphorisms, amounting to a transcrip- tion of his 1365 lectures on the Aphor- isms and their traditional " Galenic "

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.34 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 18:59:09 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: Les Commentaires de Martin de Saint-Gille sur les Amphorismes Ypocrasby Germaine Lafeuille

382 BOOK REVIEWS - ISIS, 56 3* 185 (1965)

iinterpretation. The French text, of which we have a generous 11I-quarto- page sample, is taken from a 1429 MS with slightly " modernized " spellings: the fifteenth-century French is difficult but not impossible.

Dr. Lafeuille analyzes Martin's scho- lastic methodology in commenting on ,the text, much as preachers expound a biblical passage. Valuable attention is paid to Martin's use of words and his use of synonyms connecting colloquial French with the Latinized medical vo- cabulary - this reviewer was struck by the richness of the early-fifteenth-cen- tury French medical vocabulary in com- parison with the corresponding English period. A careful analysis is made of Martin's use of writers other than Hip- pocrates and Galen (including signifi- cant citation of Aristotle, Averroes, Avicenna, Gilles de Corbeil, Halyabbas, Mesue, Isaac Israeli, Johannitius, Nicholas of Salerno and Rhazes); of his willingness (pp. 42-45) to disagree with Galen; and of his use both of his own experience and his own cultural back- ground in the preparation of his- lec- tures. A 136-page glossary of medical old French and a 25-page glossary of logical and didactic terms help to make this work a useful reference for those interested in medieval intellectual his- tory. This reviewer does not share Dr. Lafeuille's generous opinion (pp. 27- 29) of Martin's knowledge of Greek, and the illustrations, although pretty, are irrelevant to the text.

This, then, is an important and valu- able old-fashioned stu-dy - the modern term, "in depth," is applicable -of some late medieval lectures on medi- cine which supplement such familiar writings as those of Henry of Monde- ville and Guy de Chauliac. The phil- ologist will find accurate information on the development of the French medical and scientific vocabulary; the physician will find abundant detailed information on good medieval medical teaching; and the historian will be pleased to have an example of the medieval academic tradition of Greco- Roman medicine in the West, as it was viewed in the light of contem- porary literature and experience. Dr.

Lafeuille is to be congratulated for having filled a genuine need, and filled it well.

WILLIAM D. SHARPE

New Jersey College of Medicine

ICLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

Pliny's Natural History. A Selection from Philemon Holland's Translation. Edited by J. Newsome. xxviii + 341 pp, gloss., name index. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1964. 50s.

It is problematic whether the seven- teenth-century reader was better pre- pared to understand the " new science" as a result of reading Pliny. There is no doubt, however, that Holland's translation made available a store of learning not inferior to many contem- porary collections and that echoes of this translation abound in the litera- ture of the day. Holland (1552-1637) took Pliny and his task of translation seriously. By comparing the first edi- tion of his translation (1601) with the revised edition (1634) it is evident that he made every effort to incorporate the readings and scholarly annotations of the latest Continental editions, notably those of Dalechampius and Pinaeus. As such, Holland's translation occu- pies an important place in English let- ters as well as in the history of science.

The present editor ignores the im- portance of Holland's Pliny in the history of English science. Instead, the introduction, selections, notes, and in- dexes all bespeak the antiquarian ap- proach. There is no need to apologize for this (see, for example, intro., p. xvi) for we owe much to Wright, Halliwell, Skeat, Furnivall, -and others who made accessible the scholarship of earlier cen- turies. But in addition to being anti- quarians, they were scholars and editors who knew what a square bracket was, who, if they tampered with the text, notified the reader and who, when they cited secondary sources, supplied the full bibliographic particulars. In the present case, Holland's English is up- dated, paragraphs are arbitrarily di-

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.34 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 18:59:09 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions