| This dissertation explores how western physicians have constructed, expressed, and debated the concept of poison from roughly 1250 to 1600, especially as it relates to food, medicine, and disease. Medical treatises on poison clearly illustrate how changing medical cultures impacted the literature on a problematic subject, and how natural philosophical approaches were brought to bear on a largely medical topic. The first chapter provides a broad survey of medical conceptions of poison in the Greco-Arabic tradition to about 1200. Against this background, the second chapter argues that a new kind of toxicology emerged in the fourteenth century as medico-philosophers emphasized inquiries into the nature of poison itself, as opposed to its symptoms. Physicians began to address theoretical questions about what constituted poison, and to ask whether or not any category of substance could be considered, in absolute terms, to be a 'poison.' The third chapter shows how authors of plague tracts often used analogies to poison to describe a disease that seemed unlike any other, and thus formed a new conceptual pairing between the notions of poison and disease. The fourth chapter surveys the variety of fifteenth-century approaches to the topic, most of which emphasized inquiry into the properties of poison and the poisonous body (usually the patient, but sometimes animals and plants as well). The fifth chapter investigates how sixteenth-century physicians understood the role of poison as a cause of disease and how medical humanism influenced literature on poison. |
