The context of medieval university medicine

The establishment of university faculties of medicine provided a distinct type of professional and intellectual formation that shaped a new medical élite. Yet the content of the medicine studied and practised by those trained in the medieval universities of western Europe was neither the creation nor the exclusive property of the university milieu. The medicine of learned university physicians was at once an intellectual enterprise grounded in the medicine of classical antiquity and the Islamic world and an activity that had much in common with that of the numerous contemporary medical and surgical practitioners who received their formation outside the universities.

The intellectual preparation for the rise of university medicine, as for other aspects of the learning of the high and later Middle Ages, was provided by the translations of Greek and Arabic texts which began to proliferate in the late eleventh century. For medicine, the results included not only the availability of more of the medical heritage of antiquity, but also an enlargement of the theoretical component in contemporary medical writing, along with an increased stress on the connections between medicine and natural philosophy and the expansion of the role of dialectic in medical discourse. And the general intellectual revival that accompanied the reception of the new translations produced a great expansion in quantity and increase in diversity of all kinds of Latin medical writing, whether commentaries, works containing recommendations for practice, books on surgery, or consilia (that is, advice for individual cases or conditions).