[The boundaries of the discipline. Selection of therapies in medieval Dutch texts on surgery].

Abstract

In the fourteenth century, a new genre of surgical texts emerged: the surgical textbook in the vernacular. They were usually written by learned authors, who had not received a university education. These authors stood for a difficult task, as the domain of learned surgery was not as clearly defined as it is nowadays. According to the learned surgeons, their uneducated competitors used quite unorthodox cures, which they presented with much bravura. Two important surgical texts in Flemish vernacular, written by Jan Yperman and Thomaes Scellinck, are investigated in this article. In which ways did the authors select cures and remedies? How did they define the outlines of the domain of learned surgery? Four criteria have been found in retrospect, which seem to have functioned as more or less subconscious guides for the selecting author: naturalness, rationality, learned experience, and effectiveness. To demonstrate this, remedies are discussed which lack one or more of the four principles. For instance, the criterion of naturalness is investigated through the surgeons' discussions of cures with an unnatural element, like charms. To conclude, it is shown that learned surgeons attacked their uneducated competitors with the aid of the four criteria. Yperman and Scellinck described empirics as using remedies which lacked these principles, thus placing themselves outside the domain of serious surgery.