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During the Middle Ages the hospital network in Western Europe reached an extraordinary development. In the case of Seville this hospital expansion was very prominent, since the late fifteenth century had more than a hundred centres. The objective of this study is to demonstrate how the Sevillian secular clergy controlled hospital care in a very prominent way in the city of the Betis river. This translated into a prominent role in the religious nature of Sevillian hospitals, despite the presence of professionals linked to medicine within de hospital staff. In this way the Church of late medieval Seville instrumentalized the assistance needs as an element of its empowerment in the cuty what was to become the port and the gate way to the Indies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensuring material and healthy conditions to survive early childhood was a first-order topic among monarchies from the medieval West. The first years of life were a crucial stage, as infant mortality rates used to reach high levels. In the court of King James II of Aragon, care and personnel were not spared in order to nourish and guarantee a full development for the monarch's ten children. In this process, an essential role used to be performed by the wet nurse, who was in charge of breastfeeding newborns until the age of seven or eight years. This article aims to analyze the role played by wet nursing within the Aragonese royal court and the dietary and medical interferences, as well as the moral pressures, that existed on them. As objects of analysis, a set of letters exchanged between King James II and his children's wet nursing and two medical treatises (On the Disease of Women, by Trotula di Ruggiero, and the Children's Treaty, by Bernardo de Gordon and the Afonsinas Partidas were used. These sources provided us a view of this essential position regarding the upbringing of future crown heirs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Πόνημα ἰατρικόν by Michael Psellos is a didactic poem on medicine. The work, as it has been preserved until today, lacks a programmatic prologue, nevertheless, in a brief passage, introduced between verses 531-537, the author states that his intention is not to gather everything about this discipline, but to stir up the appetite for it in his learned friends using the charm of the verses. Taking into account the intentions expressed by the author himself, our aim is to analyze, by comparing and contrasting the poem with its sources (Paul of Aegina, Theophilus Protospatharius and Palladius of Alexandria), what kind of medical contents he selects from these sources and how he adapts and uses them, in order to verify how Psellos' purpose is fulfilled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to analyse the medical texts on theorica and practica medica about the diseases of the female body in the process of generation of human life, written by the fisicus (doctors) in the scholastic setting in Europe, by the 13th and 14th centuries. For this purpose, it was chosen two medical writings: De secretis mulierum, which has been attributed to Pseudo-Albert Magnus, an example of a secret literature which refers to mysterious matters pertaining to reproductive life; and Thesaurus pauperum, which has been attributed to the physician Petrus Hispanus, a collection of old and new recipes for the therapeutic use of laymen, poor healing practitioners (practica medica). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]