Humanistas médicos en el Renacimiento vallisoletano (review)

Despite its unquestionable relevance, the history of medical and scientific language has been scarcely dealt with. Instead, it has generally been trapped in a "no-man's land" between philologists' lack of concern for the topic and an ignorance of its analytical tools on the part of historians of medicine and science. In the history of Europe it is difficult to find any phenomenon that has consciously given more emphasis to language as an agent for cultural and pedagogical reform than the movement known as Renaissance humanism. Thus the interest of the monographic study reviewed here. In Humanistas médicos, the classical philologist J. I. Blanco Pérez focuses on the language--mostly Latin, but also Castilian--of medical humanists bound to the University of Valladolid who have left us printed medical works. The volume is partly built on a Ph.D. dissertation (Valladolid, 1996) inscribed within a research program that is concerned with the language of medical humanism in Renaissance Spain, led by Enrique Montero Cartelle (professor of Latin at Valladolid). Other outstanding results of this program include two monographs focusing upon the same topic in the other two major sixteenth-century Castilian universities, namely those of [End Page 131] Alcalá (Ana I. Martín Ferreira, El humanismo médico en la Universidad de Alcalá [siglo XVI], 1995) and Salamanca (M. Jesús Pérez Ibáñez, El humanismo médico en la Universidad de Salamanca [siglo XVI], 1998)

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