Talk:Philaretus (medical writer)

The redirect on article Arnold Geulincx should be replaced by Theophilus Protospatharius --Fredou (talk) 10:37, 18 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Neither of these seems to be correct Philaretus wrote a short book on "pulses" nothing else is known about him. Theophilus wrote "on Urine"

The Ars Medicine also corrected the earlier Latin ignorance of uroscopy by including a short tract by the Byzantine Theophilus. This was matched by an incomplete tract on prognostication from the pulse attributed to a Philaretus (about whom little is known). In short, almost the whole early collection of texts was prognostic in intent. Clearly, medieval doctors were aware of the rewards of good prognostication. A successful outcome of a case enhanced the practitioner's reputation and a prediction of death avoided damaging it.^[1]

The composition and content of the book resemble a string of pearls—Margaritha, the humanists would say—of medical statements from antique and medieval medical authors. The uroscopic treatise, for instance, is preceded by an elegantly styled rhetorical introduction which claims that the work drew information from Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, Theophilus Philaretus, Ysaac (Isaac Judaeus), and Aegidius Corboliensis. The actual work, however, is in fact nothing more than an adapted edition of Aegidius Corboliensis's De urinis, for which Pinder used the text with commentary by Gentile da Foligno.^[2]

It marks also a significant shift, for it transforms uroscopy, which Galen had used as an occasional guide to diagnosis, into an essential element in medical practice. Henceforth, in both East and West, the urine flask becomes the symbol of the educated physician. There were similar short, comprehensive guides to taking the pulse, such as that by Philaretus (or Philagrius), which extended what Galen had done in his own abridgments of his pulse treatises.^[3]

J8079s (talk) 00:49, 25 March 2015 (UTC) [reply]