| The Liber Uricrisiarum of Wellcome MS 225 is a fifteenth-century treatise on uroscopy, the science of diagnosing illness by examining a patient's urine. The manuscript is previously unpublished; furthermore, the dissertation provides scholars with the first major text in Middle English on the subject. Uroscopy was ancient and was widely used: for nearly sixteen centuries it was the principal means of diagnosis. Moreover, in Middle Eastern and Western civilizations, uroscopy was synonymous with and emblematic of the medical profession.;According to the manuscript itself, the Liber Uricrisiarum is a translation, nearly "word for worde," of the treatise De Urinis by Isaac Judaeus, a Hebrew physician of the late ninth and early tenth centuries. The Liber Uricrisiarum is in fact not simply a translation but an elaboration of Isaac's text. There is, for example, a long digression on the planets and on astrology, as well as discussions of the humors, digestion, circulation, anatomy, and reproduction, making the Liber Uricrisiarum a relatively compact compendium of medieval medicine.;The existence of this text and others like it in Middle English demonstrates the emergence of vernacular texts, generally translations from Latin or Greek, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. These vernacular texts made medical and scientific knowledge available to the lay medical practitioner, the leche (healer) who was not educated at a university as was the physician and who therefore knew little Latin or Greek. Accordingly, Wellcome MS 225 does not discuss the philosophy of diagnosis, suggesting a text made for medical practitioners rather than medical theoreticians.;The introduction accompanying the edited text places the manuscript in its historical context and also discusses, among other subjects, sources and analogues, scribal hands, the dialect in which the manuscript was written, and editorial principles. Textual notes describe individual features of the manuscript in detail, and explanatory notes identify medical terminology and Latin words, as well as Middle English vocabulary.;The manuscript has been ascribed to Henry Daniel, a Dominican friar who flourished around 1379. But the ascription, though plausible, remains doubtful. |
