Medical practice and manuscripts in Byzantium

Scholars, past and present, have belittled Byzantine medicine for its perceived static and derivative nature. Applied to the medicine of the centuries immediately before and after the year 1000, these criticisms, though apparently sustainable, fail to recognize its underlying vigour. It was a practical craft medicine, and one which used elements of magic and religion to compensate for the intractability of the many diseases that were not amenable to medicine. These centuries were a time when hospitals flourished in Byzantium, and this paper assembles and describes some of the manuscripts that can be associated with them. The influence of islamic medicine, which had hitherto borrowed from Byzantium, is also examined. If the Byzantine medicine of this period could not claim great originality or innovation, it had none the less distilled what was best and most useful from the long and often complex medical writings of antiquity, ensured its transmission, and preserved much from earlier times that would otherwise now be lost.