268 Mehmed I and theology as one of the three higher disciplines As they did in science, universities benefited in medicine from the flood of Spanish Arabic translations of the mid-12th century, the most influential work being Avicenna’s Canon, a massive systematization of Galenic medicine that eventually served in Latin translation as a medical textbook A third wave of medical translations in the 13th century was led by the royal physician Arnauld of Villanova and included a higher proportion of translations directly from the Greek Latin Christians also began to write medical treatises, commentaries, and compendia of their own, although nothing to challenge the intellectual authority of Greek and Arabic works In addition to Paris and Montpellier in southern France, the most important universities for medicine were mostly Italian, particularly Bologna and Padua The bachelor of medicine degree took about seven years, the M.D about 10 As the medical curriculum developed, textual study began to be supplemented with other forms of medical education Some universities required medical students to get practical experience working with a physician, and beginning in the 14th century some Mediterranean universities began to require attendance at dissections The Galenic medicine taught in the universities was based on a theory of the four “humors” of the human body: yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood A healthy body was one where the humors balanced This led to the popularity of bloodletting as a therapy, as it allegedly relieved the distress caused by an excess of blood Although Galen differed from Aristotle on some biological questions, Galenic medicine was mostly compatible with Aristotelian natural philosophy, and physicians were educated in natural philosophy as well as medicine proper It was also considered important for a physician to know astrology to choose the best times to perform medical procedures Largely outside the university tradition were Jewish physicians, some of whom served as personal physicians for the most powerful Christians in Europe Also outside the university tradition were women writers on medicine such as the nun Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) Her Book of Simple Medicines includes information on the curative power of herbs and jewels There was also a mysterious woman medical writer at Salerno named Trotula, but she had no successors on university faculties One set of rivals to the physicians, as educated medical professionals, were the surgeons, who in addition to practicing what is now called surgery were also active in the treatment of skin disease (Italy was exceptional in that physicians were trained as surgeons as well.) Surgery was not taught at the university, but through apprenticeship, which eventually led to the formation of a guild system Physicians, a tiny minority among Europe’s medical practitioners, distinguished themselves from surgeons (and other healers like midwives and herbalists) through a focus on why the body became sick, rather than merely on the cure Physicians often emphasized maintaining health through proper diet and the observance of astrological moments rather than healing the sick By the late Middle Ages a network of medical institutions outside university medical faculties had begun to develop Surgeons organized themselves into guilds such as Paris’s College of Saint Cosme, founded in 1210 Governments established systems of licensing practitioners, although unlicensed practitioners continued to flourish Cities, beginning in Italy, hired public physicians Hospitals, originally places for the sick to die or recover, started hiring physicians as attendants See also medieval Europe: educational system; Scholasticism; universities, European Further reading: Crombie, A C Science in the Middle Ages, 5th to 13th Centuries Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969; Grant, Edward Planets, Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Garcia-Ballester, Luis Galen and Galenism: Theory and Medical Practice from Antiquity to the European Renaissance Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002; Maier, Anneliese On the Threshold of Exact Science: Selected Writings of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural Philosophy Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982; Porter, Roy The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity New York: W.W Norton, 1998 William E Burns Mehmed I (1389?–1421) Ottoman ruler Mehmed I came to the Ottoman Turkish throne at perhaps the most desperate time in the dynasty’s history Up until the reign of his father, Bayezid I, the Ottoman rise to power had been meteoric His grandfather, Sultan Murad I, had defeated the Serbian King Lazar at Kosovo in 1389, opening up the Balkans to Ottoman conquest Yet, at the moment of victory, one of Lazar’s lieutenants, Miloš Obilic´, as Caroline Finkel relates in her Osman’s Dream: The History of The Ottoman Empire,