ABSTRACT
Medieval medicine is usually divided into three periods: monastery medicine, the Arab doctors and the Scholastic doctors. The monasteries became natural places of collection for the sick and weak. One virtue of monastery medicine was that it stimulated the development of hospitals. Arab doctors were raised in the Alexandrian tradition, and the more readily because the nomadic tribes, so long divided, had never before possessed the means or possibility to concern themselves with physicians at all. Medicine was practised by priests and monks without any insight into human anatomy and physiology. Guy de Chauliac always emphasized the value of anatomy, a subject on which he concentrated under Mundinus in Bologna. The most popular of the diagnostic methods was uroscopy. Its basic assumption was that a doctor could establish the nature of an illness by observing the patient’s urine, sometimes even without seeing the patient.
