The Transmission of Medical Knowledge in Script and Print

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The fifteenth century remains a lacuna in the history of Western medicine, poised between a manuscript Middle Ages and a Renaissance age of print. Compared with the period before 1350, university manuscripts are fewer, and the transition to a print culture was slow. The earliest printings were of short manuals of health and plague tracts rather than learned tomes, and not all the familiar treatises of the medieval school room made their way into print before 1500. The humanist demand for a return to classical founts was scarcely visible in printed books before the 1520s, and printers preferred to place any new translation alongside its medieval predecessor. Nonetheless, by 1500 medical knowledge circulated in print rather than in manuscript, save for original Greek texts, most of which were not printed until after 1525.