Old-Time Makers of Medicine: The Story of Medieval Physicians, Scholars, and the History of Medicine - Hardcover

Old-Time Makers of Medicine is James J. Walsh's historical account of the physicians, teachers, translators, scholars, and medical schools that shaped medicine during the Middle Ages. Rather than treating medieval medicine as a blank interval between antiquity and the modern scientific age, Walsh presents a more continuous story: Greek, Roman, Arabic, Jewish, monastic, scholastic, and university traditions all contribute to the preservation and development of medical learning.

First published by Fordham University Press in 1911, the book surveys figures and institutions connected with medieval medical education, anatomy, surgery, therapeutics, hospitals, public health, and the transmission of scientific knowledge. Walsh writes with a strong corrective purpose, challenging the assumption that the Middle Ages were simply an age of ignorance, and arguing instead for the importance of medieval students and teachers in the long history of medicine. Google Books records the 1911 Fordham University Press edition at 446 pages.

For readers of medical history, medieval history, biography, the history of science, and classic works on the development of medicine, Old-Time Makers of Medicine remains a useful and readable early twentieth-century account of the men and institutions that carried medical knowledge through one of Europe's most misunderstood periods.