The Conciliator, and Medicine Argued Into Agreement

Pietro d'Abano's standing in his own century rests on the Conciliator Differentiarum Philosophorum et Praecipue Medicorum, a book whose method is announced in its title. He set out the points on which the authorities disagree, Aristotle against Galen, the Greeks against their Arabic commentators, and worked through each difference until he could show it resolved or explain why it could not be. The work runs to more than two hundred such questions and was still being printed in the sixteenth century.

He had the equipment for it. He is reported to have travelled to Constantinople to read Greek medical and astronomical texts in the original, at a time when the Latin West met most of them only through translations of Arabic translations, and he produced Latin versions of his own. He taught at Paris in the 1290s and then returned to Padua, whose medical faculty was becoming the strongest in Europe.

His astrology sits inside that project rather than beside it. The Lucidator dubitabilium astronomiae treats astronomy and astrology as one discipline resting on a natural basis, and in medicine he took celestial timing as a physical factor acting on the body in the way that climate or diet do. That was a mainstream scholastic position in his generation rather than an esoteric one, and it is worth saying plainly, because his later reputation as a magician reads his work backwards through a book he did not write.