We may notice here a curious legend of Naples to which Sir Walter Scott has drawn attention in the account he gives of his great namesake.[210] It would seem to suggest that this age, perhaps by means of Michael Scot, was acquainted with philosophical instruments rarer if not more useful than the astrolabe. The romance of Vergilius tells how that hero founded ‘in the middes of the see a fayer towne, with great landes belongynge to it; … and called it Napells. And the fandacyon of it was of egges, and in that towne of Napells he made a tower with iiii corners, and in the toppe he set an apell upon an yron yarde, and no man culd pull away that apell without he brake it; and thoroughe that yren set he a bolte, and in that bolte set he a egge. And he henge the apell by the stauke upon a cheyne, and so hangeth it still. And when the egge styrreth, so shoulde the towne of Napells quake; and when the egge brake, then shulde the towne sinke,’ The reference here is of course to the Castel del Ovo at Naples, a fortress which we know to have been built, or at least strengthened, by Frederick II. What if the rest of the legend embalm, like a fly in amber, the tradition, strangely altered, of some instrument set up there to measure the force of the earthquakes so prevalent in that part of Italy?
Such a notion is not the pure matter of conjecture it may at first sight seem to be. Frederick was in relation with those who might well have put him in possession of this among other secrets. When the Tartars stormed the Vulture’s Nest, as it was called, in the Syrian castle of Alamout, they found an observatory well supplied with instruments of precision, and that of all kinds.[211] Now this place was the last refuge of the Assassins, that strange sect who owned obedience to the Old Man of the Mountain. Frederick II. when in the East paid these people a visit,[212] and again at Melfi, in his own dominions, he received their ambassadors and entertained them at a great banquet.[213] Considering then the Emperor’s well-known curiosity in all matters of physical science, we may feel sure he would profit by any improvements or discoveries the observers at Alamout could communicate. If the contrivance set up at Naples was really a seismometer, this would furnish a curious comment on Bacon’s statement that Michael Scot excelled in investigating the movements of matter.[214]
Passing to what rests on more certain evidence, we find Scot’s fame in those days attested by one of his most distinguished contemporaries, and that in a way which makes him appear as an honoured master in the science of algebra, then lately introduced from the Moorish schools. This improvement and testimony were both of them due to a certain Leonardo of the Bonacci family of Pisa, who was, perhaps, the first to bring the new method of calculation to the knowledge of his countrymen. His father had been overseer of the customs at Bougie, in Barbary,[215] on behalf of the Pisan merchants who traded thither. Observing the superior way of reckoning used by the Moors in that country, he sent home for his son that the boy might be trained in this admirable way of counting. Leonardo perfected his art in after years by travel and study in Egypt, Syria, and Greece, as well as in Sicily and Provence. The ripe fruit of this knowledge saw the light in 1222, when he published for the first time his famous Liber Abbaci. It consisted of fifteen chapters, in which the author declared the secret of the Indian numerals as well as the fundamental processes of algebra.[216]
This brief account of one who must ever hold an honourable place in the history of mathematical science may enable us to value at its true worth the praise which Leonardo bestowed on Michael Scot. It seems that the first edition of the Liber Abbaci was not entirely satisfactory. Scot wrote a letter to the author which possibly contained strictures on the work, and asked that a copy of the emended edition should be sent him. Pisano replied by dedicating the book to his correspondent. It appeared in 1228, and contained a prefatory letter, in which the author addresses Scot in the highest terms of respect, calling him by that title of Supreme Master which he had won at Paris, and submitting the Liber Abbaci, even in this its final form, to his further emendation. This laudari a laudato must have been most grateful to the philosopher, and it enables us to see the standing he had among the mathematicians of his time. One would almost be disposed to infer, from the respect Pisano paid him, that Scot himself had composed or translated some lost work on algebra. In another connection we shall find reason to think that this conjecture may be well founded.[217]
Besides the practice of astrology and his deeper researches in astronomy and mathematics, Michael Scot devoted himself to another profession, that of medicine. This was then a science very imperfectly understood, yet here too, in the years that followed his return to court, Scot made a name for himself as a physician, and contributed something to the advancement of human knowledge in one of its most important branches. The healing art in Europe had only just begun to emerge from that primitive state in which savage peoples still possess it; overlaid by charms and incantations; the peculiar department of the wise woman, the sorcerer, and the priest. Among the Latin races the lady of the castle and the bella donna of the village still cared for rich and poor in their various accidents and sicknesses, as indeed they continued to do for several ages more. Only crowned heads, the wealthiest of the nobility, or the rich merchants of the cities, began to require and employ the services of regular physicians. These were generally Jews, sometimes Moors;[218] and thus fashion and experience alike began to make popular among our ancestors the superior claims of science in medicine. Such science had undoubtedly survived from the days and in the works of Hippocrates, Galen, and Celsus, and was now preserved in the theory and practice of the Arabian schools.
This point once reached, a further advance soon became inevitable. Attention had been called to a deeper source of medical knowledge than that generally possessed in the West. Learned men, whose tastes led them this way, naturally sought to inform their minds by procuring translations of the Arabic works on medicine. The just fame of Salerno, a medical school which had been founded in the closing years of the eleventh century by Robert Guiscard, depended on the intelligent zeal with which this plan of research was then pursued.[219] The kingdom of Sicily indeed occupies as important a place in the progress of the healing art as Spain itself does with regard to the history of philosophy and of science in general.
Frederick II., as might have been expected, did much to encourage and regulate these useful studies. We have already noticed the bent of his mind towards comparative physiology, and the daring experiments he carried out, in corpore vili et vivo. One of the first literary and scientific works which he commanded, or at least accepted when it was dedicated to him, was a compilation from three ancient authors upon a medical subject.[220] He was then but eighteen years of age. As time went on his interest in this science continued, and became the motive to a liberal and enlightened policy. He regarded medicine as a matter of national importance, and strove by wise laws to make the practice of that profession as intelligent and useful as possible. He protected the faculty at Salerno and created that of Naples. None might lecture elsewhere in the Sicilies, and every physician in the kingdom must hold testimonials from one or other of these schools, as well as a government licence to practise. The course preliminary to qualification consisted of three years in arts and five in medicine and surgery. As a guide to the professors, the doctrine of Hippocrates and Galen was declared normal in the schools; yet, lest this should become merely formal and traditional, directions were given that the students should have practice in anatomy. Regarding the related trade of the apothecary, the laws denounced the adulteration of drugs. Physicians might not claim a greater fee than half a taren of gold per diem, which gave the patient a right to be visited thrice in the day. The poor were to be attended free of charge. We have thought it right to be particular in these details, as they throw light on the times, and on Scot’s own practice as a physician. Considering indeed the place he held about the Emperor’s person, and the high estimation in which his master held him, it seems not at all improbable that his may have been the hand which drew these wise enactments, or his at least the suggestion which commended them to Frederick. They must in any case have been the rules under which he carried on his work as a doctor of medicine.
This branch of Michael Scot’s activity relates itself easily and naturally to what we already know of his acquirements and familiarity with the Arabian authors. It was from the De Medicina of Rases that he borrowed so much material for his Physionomia. The Abbreviatio Avicennae too, which he translated for Frederick in 1210, was in no small part a treatise on comparative anatomy and physiology, nor is it likely that he can have missed reading the famous canon of the same author, in which Avicenna expounds a complete body of practical medicine. We need not wonder then to find that, on Scot’s return to court, his work on Averroës done, he added the practice of physic to his duties as Imperial Astrologer. This new profession must have offered itself to him as another means of securing a general forgetfulness of the questionable direction in which his philosophical studies had lately carried him.
He seems in fact to have won almost as much fame in medicine as he had made for himself in the study of mathematics. Lesley says ‘he gained much praise as a philosopher, astronomer, and physician.’ Dempster speaks of his ‘singular skill,’ calling him ‘one of the first physicians for learning’[221] and adding that Camperius[222] had the highest opinion of him. An anonymous writer, De claris Doctrina Scotis, is even more precise, telling us that Scot was noted for the cures he effected in difficult cases, and that he excelled in the treatment of leprosy, gout, and dropsy.[223]
Some slight remains of this skill are to be found in the libraries of Europe; for Michael Scot was a writer on the science of his art as well as a practising physician. The chief of these relics is a considerable work on the urine. This subject had been widely, if not deeply, studied by the more ancient medical authorities, whose investigations appear in the Ketab Albaul of Al Kairouani,[224] and in a book to which we have already more than once referred: the De Urinis compiled for Frederick in 1212.[225] The same title belongs to one of the treatises by Avicenna, which has been reprinted in the present century.[226]