Abstract

It is well known that the belief that music is inherent in the beating of the pulse was widely held throughout the Middle Ages. Numerous brief but explicit statements of this belief, and of the associated ideas that music is present in other bodily rhythms and or in the virtues and humors can be culled from the writings on music of music theorists and encyclopedists. For such writers, the idea of the musicality of pulse was, of course, one specific expression of the more general notion that musical harmonies inhere in the body and soul of man. The supposed links between music and human physiology and psychology were, however, not only of interest to writers on music: as might be expected, physicians too concerned themselves with the subject. Moreover, certain medical writers who flourished in the north Italian studia during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries seem to have been much readier than either musical theorists or natural philosophers to provide their readers with detailed discussion of the nature of the music of pulse. The works of these physicians span nearly two hundred years of the teaching of the Italian schools and represent a fairly continuous tradition. Their views not only throw light on the concept of pulse music itself, and hence on one aspect of late medieval handling of the ancient theme of the harmonies of the universe; they also illustrate, in one small area, something of the nature of the actual application in medical training of the venerable tradition linking medicine with the liberal arts and with philosophy, a tradition institutionalized in the very existence of the faculties “of arts and medicine” of the Italian universities. For academic writers on medicine, indeed, the value of a knowledge of music for the understanding of pulse became one of a set of axiomatic illustrations of the importance of an education in liberal arts for physicians. To what extent this particular prescription was seriously intended or taken the following discussion of the opinions and sources of some of the academic medical writers on the music of pulse may help to show. jQuery.click { event.preventDefault(); })