A Cultural History of the Senses in the Middle Ages by Richard G. Newhauser;

Author:Richard G. Newhauser;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474233149
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2014-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 6.1: The physician examines urine in a jordan. From a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Antidotarium Nicolai. Oxford, All Souls College MS 72 fol. 5r. Reproduced by permission of the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.

The protocol for this visual ritual is outlined by Isaac Judaeus (1966: 153). The doctor must choose a brightly-lit place, with the sun opposite. Holding the flask in his right hand, he should pass his left hand behind it to determine whether the urine is clear or turbid. He should move the flask gently to assess the lightness of the sediment and how rapidly it settled. But should the physician also smell, or even taste, the urine? Theoretically, yes, because taste was the sense that offered the most direct access to the nature of a substance (Burnett 2011: 337). Isaac discusses tasting urine in a matter-of-fact manner: urine which is bitter betokens excessive red bile, acid urine indicates acidic phlegm, and salty urine, salt phlegm (Isaac Judaeus 1966: 162). However, most textbooks of uroscopy focused exclusively on sight. Some medieval health care consumers tested a doctor’s competence by bringing him a fake urine sample of white wine or nettle tea. To evade these tricks, Arnau of Vilanova advised taking a surreptitious sniff of the contents of the jordan, or sneaking a taste on the end of one’s finger (Sigerist 1946: 135–43). The fact that these gestures are regarded as subterfuges reinforces the impression that urine was normally judged by sight. Nonetheless, the implication that learned physicians poked their noses into excreta, or even put it into their mouths, was fodder for satire. The doctors at the papal court, excoriated by Petrarch in his Invective, are hardly exemplars of health. Indeed, they are pale and emaciated because they “rummage around in sloshing chamber-pots.” The dark, fetid atmosphere of the close-stool seeps into their bodies: “I say that your color, smell, and taste come from the stuff to which you are exposed—shit” (Petrarch 2003: 81).

The prestige of the sense of sight helped offset the undignified nature of its object, urine. Sight was the most spiritual of the senses, associated with light, and the element of fire which occupied the highest rung in the physical universe. Hearing came next, being linked to air; smell was conveyed by a sort of vapor; taste, and above all, touch, were earthy. Touch was the sense which all animals shared, and hence not exclusive to humans (Salmón 2005: 64–5; Vinge 1975: 47–58). Yet Galen associated the hand not only with the highest human faculty of reason, but with touch itself, in its most refined and informative manifestation. Pulse diagnosis was grounded in this acutely refined and discriminating sense of touch.

Uroscopy was a public performance before an audience who listened as the doctor described aloud what he saw in the jordan, displaying his learning and detective skills to the patient and bystanders (see Figure 6.1). But doctors worried that publicity made uroscopy easy for empirics to imitate (Stolberg 2007). Pulse-taking had

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