Gilles de Corbeil
Gilles de Corbeil (Latin: Egidius de Corbolio or Egidius Corboliensis; also Aegidius) was a French royal physician, teacher, and poet. He was born in approximately 1140 in Corbeil and died in the first quarter of the 13th century. He is the author of four medical poems and a scathing anti-clerical satire, all in Latin dactylic hexameters.
Life and works
Education and De compositorum medicaminum
Gilles de Corbeil was born in Corbeil-Essonnes. He studied at the Schola Medica Salernitana, absorbing its theories and practices and becoming a teacher himself. He praises his teachers Romuald Guarna and Peter Musandinus (in turn the student of Bartholomew of Salerno) in his long poem (four books and 4,663 verses) of ca. 1194 on Salernitan drug therapy, De laudibus et virtutibus compositorum medicaminum.[1][2] He complains, however, of the school's degeneration after the sack of Salerno in 1194 by Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor,[3] and in the same poem he criticizes its "granting medical degrees, and consequently a license to lecture, to unlearned and inexperienced youths."[4][5]
Paris and Montpellier
He returned to
Poems for students: De urinis and De pulsibus
His brief poems De urinis (352 verses on uroscopy) and De pulsibus (380 verses on Galenic pulsology), based on treatises by Theophilus Protospatharius by way of the Articella,[2] were intended as mnemonic aids for his students to memorize, reflecting his preoccupation with pedagogy.[8] They became didactic classics and were widely studied, copied, and commented upon.[2]
De signis et symptomatibus egritudinum
This poem of 2,358 verses, not printed until 1907, deals with the signs and symptoms of
Ierapigra ad purgandos prelatos
His Laxative for Purging Prelates (
Editions
- Johann Ludwig Choulant, Aegidii Corboliensis Carmina Medica, Leipzig, 1826 (online)
- Camille Vieillard, L'urologie et les médecins urologues dans la médecine ancienne: Gilles de Corbeil, Paris, 1903 (online)
- Teubner, 1907, editio princeps (online)
- Dieter Scheler, Die Ierapigra ad purgandos prelatos des Egidius von Corbeil, Teildruck Phil. Diss. Würzburg, Bochum, 1972
Translations
- A text from De urinis, translated by Michael R. McVaugh (originally in Sourcebook in Medieval Science, ed. Edward Grant, Harvard University Press, 1974, pp. 748–50), is reprinted in Medieval Medicine: A Reader, ed. Faith Wallis, University of Toronto Press, 2010, pp. 256-258
Notes
- ^ Peter Dronke (ed.), A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 454; Vieillard, p. 225
- ^ a b c d e f Faith Wallis, "Gilles de Corbeil," in T. Glick et al., eds., Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia, Routledge, 2005, pp. 198-199
- ^ Fielding Hudson Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine, 2nd edition, Philadelphia, 1917, p. 134
- ^ Henry Malden, On the Origin of Universities and Academical Degrees, London, 1835, p. 66
- ^ Vieillard, p. 218
- ^ P. Pansier, "Les maîtres de la faculté de médecine de Montpellier au moyen-âge: XIIe siècle" Janus 9 (1904), pp. 443-451, at pp. 448 ff.
- ^ John W. Baldwin: Masters at Paris from 1179 to 1215: A Social Perspective. In: Robert L. Benson, Giles Constable (Ed.): Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century. Oxford 1982, S. 147.
- ^ Mireille Ausécache, "Gilles de Corbeil, ou le médecin pédagogue au tournant des XIIe et XIIIe siècles," Early Science and Medicine 3:3 (1998), pp. 187-214
- ^ Vieillard, p. 259
- ^ Vieillard, p. 258
- ^ Vieillard, pp. 234, 259
- ^ Thomas Haye, Päpste und Poeten: Die mittelalterliche Kurie als Objekt und Förderer panegyrischer Dichtung, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 193 f.