Résumé :
Scholars, past and present, have belittled Byzantine medicine for its perceived
static and derivative nature. Applied to the medicine of the centuries immediately before
and after the year 1000, these criticisms, though apparently sustainable, fail to recognize its
underlying vigour. It was a practical craft medicine, and one which used elements of magic
and religion to compensate for the intractability of the many diseases that were not amenable
to medicine. These centuries were a time when hospitals flourished in Byzantium, and this
paper assembles and describes some of the manuscripts that can be associated with them.
The influence of Islamic medicine, which had hitherto borrowed from Byzantium, is also
examined. If the Byzantine medicine of this period could not claim great originality or
innovation, it had none the less distilled what was best and most useful from the long and
often complex medical writings of antiquity, ensured its transmission, and preserved much
from earlier times that would otherwise now be lost.