Theophilus’ <i>Auctoritas:</i> The Role of <i>De urinis</i> in the Medical Curriculum of the 12th–13th Centuries

Abstract

The three principles to know, to know how and to know how to be are already condensed in the works of Theophilos (7th–9th centuries). Theophilus’ De urinis was included in Latin translation in the Articella, probably because of its intermediate position between the texts of high doctrinal value by Hippocrates and Galen (lacking, however, a unifying ‘theory of urine’) and the epitomes, short manuals without any theoretical background. It thus forms an excellent synthesis of a cultural approach reconciling iatrosophia and techne and offers to the reader a text reconciling the theory and the practice, useful to health workers in hospitals, novice beginners and medical scholars. Thanks to his strong attention to the correlation between symptoms and pathology and to his search for assessment scales, Theophilus became the author on whom the birth of medical medieval studies was founded.

The Late Medieval Kidney—Nephrology in and about the Fourteenth Century

“…The importance of examining the urine was appreciated by academicians who integrated the Byzantine text of Theophilus (7th century) De urinis in the medical curriculum relatively early, and added to it that of the translated Arabic text Kitab al Baul (Book of urine) of Isaac Judaeus (ca. 855–955) subsequently (14,29,50–52). However, being a subject of practical rather than theoretical merit the study of uroscopy was not a standard requirement for graduation from medical school, and was taken up principally by the practical providers of daily health care (7,14,19,29,52).…”