Hellenism postponed: some aspects of Renaissance medicine, 1490-1530

This paper aims to draw attention to some of the problems in traditional accounts of the revival of classical medicine in the Renaissance. The rediscovery of Galen from 1525 onwards, and the success of Vesalian anatomy in the 1540s, have encouraged historians to read back into the period from 1490 to 1530 ideas promoted by only a handful of individuals, and to assume that the rhetoric of the reformers was swiftly successful. This was rarely the case. Few could read Greek, the manifesto of Leoniceno in 1490 demanding a return to Greek as the basis of medicine was hardly implemented before the 1530s. Instead, it was Latin authors, both from the past and among the new Humanists, who were most important in the transformation of medical ideas in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.