Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- In loving memory of Mrs Doris Patz artist, benefactress, friend
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: On Rhetoric and Remedy
- Chapter 1 The Love-Imprint
- Chapter 2 Medical Blindness, Rhetorical Insight
- Chapter 3 Irony, or the Therapeutics of Contraries
- Chapter 4 Metaphor as Experimental Medicine
- Chapter 5 Metonymy and Prosthesis
- Chapter 6 Blindfold Synecdoche
- Epilogue. Just Words
- Bibliography
- Index
- Already Published
Introduction: On Rhetoric and Remedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- In loving memory of Mrs Doris Patz artist, benefactress, friend
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: On Rhetoric and Remedy
- Chapter 1 The Love-Imprint
- Chapter 2 Medical Blindness, Rhetorical Insight
- Chapter 3 Irony, or the Therapeutics of Contraries
- Chapter 4 Metaphor as Experimental Medicine
- Chapter 5 Metonymy and Prosthesis
- Chapter 6 Blindfold Synecdoche
- Epilogue. Just Words
- Bibliography
- Index
- Already Published
Summary
Why do great excesses cause disease? Is it because they produce either excess [hyperbole] or defect [elleipsis]? And after all these constitute disease [nosos].
The author of the hugely influential Aristotelian Problemata, repeatedly translated into Latin and the Romance vernaculars during the last three centuries of the Middle Ages, asks whether humoral imbalances cause disease because they give rise to hyperbole or elleipsis (superfluity or lack). The semantic overlap between verbal and humoral states, between rhetorical figures and the etiology of disease, is striking. This enticing trace of a common ground shared by the two disciplines begs the question: what is the perceived relationship between medicine and rhetoric in the later Middle Ages? The medical domain's dependence upon basic rhetorical principles is firmly established from the early medieval period onward. According to Isidore of Seville's well-known formulation (Etymologiae IV.xiii), medicine is not included among the liberal arts because it incorporates all seven disciplines. Indeed, the encyclopedist holds that rhetorical training is essential to the physician, that he might formulate arguments (‘Similiter et Rhetoricam, ut veracibus argumentis valeat definire quae tractat’). Moreover, medicine, as practised in the medieval West, is a theoretical venture based in the creation of a discourse – that is, in a rhetoric – of symmetry and complementarity. Humoral medicine constitutes a rhetorical almost as much as a medical construct, as its emphasis on the balance and substitution of elements is dependent upon verbal representations of its system of conditions, complexions, and attributes.
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- Information
- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011