Some Current Trends in the Study of Renaissance Medicine
The following brief reflections on the present state of scholarship in Renaissance medicine make no claim to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. Medicine is of broad historical interest because a web of connections link it to the culture as a whole. Variously considered, medicine has a place in the history of science and technology, in social history, and in a wide sweep of cultural and intellectual history ranging from the history of philosophy to the study of popular mentalités. Moreover, although the field of the history of Renaissance medicine is one in which much, including fundamental work, remains to be done, it is also one that is now being vigorously developed in some widely diverse ways. Confronted with this breadth of topics and materials, I am seeking only to isolate a few major directions in current work
Gilbertus Anglicus anglicized.
BEGINNING about 1400, England experienced a remarkable increase in the amount of practical material available to readers of the vernacular. Everything from hawking to astrology found its way into English, and even Latin grammar books could explain their mysteries in the common tongue. But nowhere was this growth more striking than in the field of medicine.' It has been estimated that the number of medical manuscripts in the vernacular was six times what it had been in the fourteenth century.2 The printing-press allowed a further acceleration in output. Paul Slack cites 153 medical titles published in England 1486-1604, and estimates that "there may have been some 166,000 medical books still in use in 1604, one for every twenty people or so, had they been equally distributed."3 The roots of the medical text in English, then, lie in the manuscript tradition, with the printing-press satisfying an already-existing demand. These Middle English medical texts could be found alongside copies of the Latin medical classics, and scholars have seized on the difference in language to divide such works into opposing teams, with Latin, universities, physicians, and learned tradition on one side, and English, empiricism, surgeons, and popular superstition on the other: "In the latefourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the distinction between medical manuscripts in Latin and medical manuscripts in English was socially very significant. The difference in language separated the relatively few university-trained physicians like Chaucer's 'doctor of physik' from the unlatined others, specifically, the on-the-job-trained
On Contagion
Each player in an infinite population interacts strategically with a finite subset of that population. Suppose each player’s binary choice in each period is a best response to the population choices of the previous period. When can behaviour that is initially played by only a finite set of players spread to the whole population? This paper characterizes when such contagion is possible for arbitrary local interaction systems. Maximal contagion occurs when local interaction is sufficiently uniform and there is low neighbour growth, i.e. the number of players who can be reached in k steps does not grow exponentially in k.