The Montpellier physician Bernard de Gordon flourished in the late Middle Ages in the era when university education first evolved in the training of European physicians. Fragmentary details of his life and medical influence are known from seven books, particularly his extensive (163 chapters) text Lilium Medicine and from Chaucer's reference to him in the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer lists Bernard de Gordon as one whose writings were part of the core curriculum of the best-trained European doctors of medieval Europe. Bernard de Gordon was one of that small group of medieval physicians who reverently followed Galenic lore which had endured for a thousand years yet who began to challenge its details and to experiment clinically with new methods of treatment. In his writings, Bernard de Gordon made the first reference to spectacles and to the hernial truss. His writings also contained detailed desiderata for the ethical best practice of medicine of his day, extending the principles of both Hippocrates and Haly ibn Abbas. Unlike many of the surviving writings of other medieval medical teachers, his texts have within them a tone of humility and acknowledged fallibility. Bernard de Gordon holds a small but significant place in the evolving pre-Renaissance chronology of medical professionalism.
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References
1.
de GordonB. Regimen sanitatis. In: Liber de conservacione vite humane, IV. In the Vatican Manuscript MS Palatine Latin 1174, 14th century, folio 72 Vb. Quoted by L Demaitre's ‘Theory and Practice in Medical Education at the University of Montpellier in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries’. See reference 2.
2.
DemaitreL. Theory and practice in medical education at the University of Montpellier in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries.Journal of the History of Medicine1975; 30: 103–23.
3.
Seven dated texts of Bernard de Gordon survive: De regimine acutorum morborum (published 1294); Liber Promosticorum (25 January 1295); Tractatus de Reductione Geomancie ad orbem (22 December 1295) [A translation of a Castilian text]; De Decem Ingeniis Curandorum Morborum (July 1299); Tractatus de Gradibus (1303) [Bernard's development of an older Galenical and Averroës theory that the effects of drugs should be measured- the quantification of medicinal qualities]; Lilium Medicine (5 February 1305) and Liber de Conservacione Vite Humane (comprising four books, De flebotonia, De urinis, De pulsibus, Regimen sanitatis; 9 November 1308).
4.
de GordonB. Lilium Medicine. [Written at Montpellier, 1303-05]. Existing in several manuscript forms. The ‘probably oldest extant copy’ (reference 5) in the British Museum MS Harley 3698, Folio 1r.
5.
de GordonB. De ingeniis sanitatisi or De decem ingeniis curandorum morborum. [On The Methods of Treatment.] Vatican MS Palatine Latin 1083, 15th century, folio 283v. [Quoted by L Demaitre (see reference 2)].
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11.
Ibid.: p. 102 [Talbot writes that ‘Bernard de Gordon had a cousin, a physician and canon of Asti, which is in Italy … [with] … the possibility that the Gordon family might be Italian’ 9 P.102)].
12.
DemaitreLE (op. cit. ref. 7): pp. 3, 11. Demaitre has written ‘The Montpellier region … seems plausible as the place [of Bernard's birth] if we consistently use, as an argument ex silentio, the absence of personal reminiscences about other areas in his geographical references’.
13.
Ibid.: p. 4.
14.
RawcliffeC (op. cit. ref. 8): Plate 137: ‘Religion takes precedence over medicine at the deathbed’ [From an illustration in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. MS Latin 6966. f4. verso].
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ChaucerGThe Canterbury Tales. Translated into Modern English by N Coghill. London: Penguin Books, Reprinted with revisions2003: 443–44. [In the Prologue, the Doctor was portrayed as a skilled and learned physician and surgeon both].
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Ibid.: p. 214.
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Ibid.: p. 149.
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de GordonB (op. cit. ref. 5). [His exact words were ’ … nec nocere, de quo sit curandum … et interim insiste libris die ac noctr …].
