ABSTRACT

One possible way was copied by a scribe from an older exemplar, probably in a religious house somewhere in the territory of modern France, perhaps Burgundy in 800. ‘The human race does not know how much efficacy the vulture has in it and how much it promotes health.’ No explanation of this virtus is given, no preference expressed for types or ages of vulture. Pre-modern preferences differed. To begin with Dioscorides himself: first, his work is hardly free of elements that some scholars want to label superstitious and magical. Second, among his animal-derived prescriptions in the old Latin translation is the deployment of the entrails of the bearded vulture in remedies for colic and stones. Even the manuscripts that to medical historians most resemble the systematic treatise are still essentially anthologies on the standard model. The so-called ‘Lorsch Book of Medicines’, put together in the early ninth century at that recently founded abbey, begins with a celebrated ‘defence of medicine’.