El pelo en la tradición médica latina medieval

Abstract

This research explores the approach taken by a tradition of medieval Latin medicine towards human hair in health and in sickness. Within the medical system that we know of as humoralism, dominant in the Mediterranean basin between the fifth century B.C. and the seventeenth century, hair was the object of study in itself, as a seat of pathology and as a diagnostic element of the general state of health. Basing itself on medical and surgical sources used in the faculties of medicine of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as texts from the Salernitan tradition, the work addresses the morpho-physiology of the hair and its pathology, specifically, alopecia, grey/white hair, lice infestations, the group of ringworms and scabies. The approach is complemented with the study of the role of the hair in the diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic management of a systemic disease, leprosy. The hair as an object of study has allowed us to illustrate the functioning of humoralism as a holistic model of conceptualization and practice on the problems of health and sickness and to reflect, from the perspective of historical inquiry, upon its similarities and differences to the dominant reductionist model of the present day.