Bartholomew’s seventh book is medical, treating of infirmities in seventy chapters. His desire to be brief is probably what restrains him from including any long medical concoctions. He continues to make much use of Constantinus Africanus, who is cited in almost every chapter, and whose “many other experiments”[1347] Bartholomew often has not time to include. One of the cures cited from Constantinus is to scarify the shin bones in order to cure a headache, the theory being that this will remove the injurious humor from the head to the lower extremities.[1348] A part of the treatment prescribed for cases of frenzy is to shave the scalp and wash it with tepid vinegar or cover it with plasters made of the lung of a pig or cow. Keeping the patient firmly bound in a dark place, bleeding him, and abstaining from answering his foolish questions are other features of the regimen suggested.[1349] To rouse a patient from a state of stupor and lethargy it is recommended to pull hard at his hair or beard, dash cold water frequently in his face, or make a stench under him.[1350] An “experiment” against epilepsy from Platearius consists in scarifying three drops of blood from the patient’s scalp and at the end of the fit giving them to him to eat with a crow’s egg.[1351] Indeed crow’s eggs alone are regarded as quite beneficial. To Platearius is also credited the following method “of curing or at least palliating leprosy.”[1352] Take a red snake with a white belly, remove the venom, cut off the head and tail, cook it with leeks, and administer it frequently with food,—a preparation roughly similar to theriac. Wine in which a snake has lain putrefying a long time is “a medicine useful for many diseases,” and Bartholomew repeats the tale we have heard before of the woman who caused her blind husband to recover his sight instead of killing him when she cooked a snake instead of an eel with garlic for him to eat. After such liberties had been taken with his blindness, one would expect a husband to recover his sight, if he could!
Poisons.
The poisons of venomous animals differ. The venom of the viper is hot and dry; that of the scorpion, cold and dry; that of the spider, cold and moist. Avicenna says that the poison of the male is really more deadly than that of the female, but female serpents have more teeth and so are perhaps worse on the whole. The venom of the old is more injurious than that of the young; that of a fasting animal is more harmful than that of a full animal; and poisons are worse in summer than winter, and at noon than at night.[1353] “Diascorides” says[1354] that river crabs possess an occult virtue against the bite of mad dogs, and their ashes taken with gentian are a singular remedy. A scorpion sting may be cured by placing oil in which the scorpion has been drowned or boiled upon the puncture, or by pulverizing the scorpion’s body and placing it upon the wound. The idea of course is that the poison will return to the body from which it came.
The waters above the firmament.
In book eight Bartholomew discusses the universe and celestial bodies. According to the tradition of the saints there is a visible and an invisible heaven. The visible heaven is multiplex and subdivides into seven heavens, the aerial, ethereal, fiery, Olympian, the firmament, the aqueous or crystalline, and the empyrean. The authority of Scripture concerning the waters above the firmament causes Bartholomew to accept the existence of an aqueous or crystalline heaven. But he rejects Bede’s view that these waters are cold and congealed in order to temper the excessive heat generated by the swift revolution of the other heavens, for Job tells us that there is concord and harmony in the heavens, and cold and humid waters would be contrary to the celestial substance of the heavens. Therefore “the moderns” have in Bartholomew’s opinion “investigated the inmost secrets of philosophy more profoundly,” when, as Alexander of Hales states, they suggest that those waters are neither frigid, fluid, and humid, nor congealed, solid, and ponderous, but on the contrary very mobile and remarkable for their clearness and transparency. It is not because they are congealed but because they are transparent that this heaven is called crystalline.[1355] In other words, the “waters above the firmament” are not really waters. And the original modern investigator who ventured to dispute Bede’s authority on the subject of the waters above the firmament was not Alexander of Hales but, as we have seen, William of Conches, whom Bartholomew lists in his bibliography and quotes in other passages, although he does not mention him by name here.
The empyrean heaven: Rabanus.
Of the other heavens Bartholomew gives most space to the empyrean. It is by nature immobile and unmoved and consequently is not essential like the other heavens for the continued generation of things in our inferior world, but rather, as Alexander of Hales says, to round out the universe and the types of bodies in it. Bartholomew continues: “The empyrean heaven is the first body, simplest in nature, the least corporeal, the subtlest, the first firmament of the world, largest in quantity, lucid in quality, spherical in shape, loftiest in location since farthest from the center, embracing in its amplitude spirits and bodies visible and invisible, and the abode of the supreme God; for God may be everywhere, yet he is said especially to be in the heaven, since there shines most powerfully the working of his virtue.”[1356] After this description of the last of the visible heavens as the abode of invisible spirits and of God Himself there does not seem to be much call for an invisible heaven, which Bartholomew himself seems by this time to have forgotten. For the passage just quoted he cites Rabanus as his source “who employs the words of Basil in the Hexaemeron,” but I have been unable to find the passage either in the Hexaemeron of Basil or the works of Rabanus Maurus.[1357] Nor have I been able to find several other citations which Bartholomew makes from Rabanus in matters astronomical and astrological.
Alexander of Hales.
A word may be introduced concerning Alexander of Hales, whom Bartholomew has twice cited in the foregoing passages, but whom we probably shall not have occasion to mention again. Like Bartholomew, he was an Englishman and a Franciscan, and Bartholomew may have been either an attendant upon his lectures or his colleague at Paris. He died in 1245 and is known as one of the first to attempt to fit together previous Christian opinion and theology with the newly introduced works of Aristotle and writings of the Arabs. Of this we see evidence in the citations made from him by Bartholomew. But Alexander’s field was primarily theology and not natural science.
Aristotelian theory of one heaven.