Records of Trusted Medicines: Don Meir Alguades’s Tested Medicines (Segulot Muvḥanyot) in Context

Abstract

Don Meir Alguades’s Segulot Muvḥanyot, extant in Parma, Biblioteca Palatina MS 2474, offers a rare insight into two converging questions in the history of late-medieval medical practice: how was practical knowledge transmitted? And to what extent did this practice draw on medical theory? The present article closely examines the various features of this collection – namely, the author to whom it was attributed, the text, the codex in which it was copied, and later renditions and mentions of the text. These reveal new information on the work, its formation and its reception, as well as on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Jewish medical practice in Iberia and among Jews of Iberian descent. Considering this text as an exemplar of recorded clinical encounters allows us to advance tentative suggestions regarding the art of tailoring medical practice in the period, and the dynamics between medical theory and the medicine provided by learned physicians. The personalized recipes further demonstrate how the formulation of trust and credibility operated in Jewish medicine of the period, and how these survived through changing social contexts.