ABSTRACT
In the 1560s, with the outbreak of the French Wars of Religion, Nicolas de Nancel left Paris and his beloved teacher Ramus, for Douai, then a stronghold of the Counter-Reformation. At the new University of Douai, founded in 1562 by the Spanish king Philip II to fight heresy, Nancel took up the study of medicine. Nancel was intellectually immersed in the world of learned medicine, transcribing, emending and annotating a great number of medical texts, including treatises by ancient Greek and Arabic authors such as Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna. Nancel's stance is in keeping with the increasingly descriptive approach scholars have noted in Renaissance medicine, which, compared to its ancient and medieval precursors, devoted considerably greater attention to the individual and the particular. The ideal doctor, as described by one contemporary physician, was 'a man of judgement who gained understanding from careful observation of patients which then led to a reasoned choice of remedies'.
