Arnald of Villanova

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all the Regimen of Health and the Mirror of Medicine, with his treatise on Antichrist.

The physician's three kinds of things

Arnald teaches medicine as the schools taught it, in an order of three. First come the natural things, of which the body is made and by which it lives: the elements and their mixture, the humours, the members, the powers, their workings and the spirits. Then come the things not natural, which are not parts of the body but keep it or change it according to how they are used. Last come the things against nature: the disease, its cause and its signs. Health is the right state of the first, the physician keeps it by governing the second, and he restores it by knowing the third.

The six things a life is ruled by

His Regimen, written for the king of Aragon, sets out the things not natural one by one, since every person meets them every day. There is the air breathed, which should be clear and clean, far from marshes and foul smells; exercise and rest, the exercise taken before eating and stopped before weariness; food and drink, taken when there is hunger and thirst, in measure, and not again before the last meal is digested; sleep and waking, the sleep coming at night and not straight after a meal; the body's filling and emptying, kept in balance; and the passions of the mind.

The last he counts as great as any. Gladness and calm strengthen the spirits and the body with them, while anger, fear and long sadness weaken both, and so the physician must look after a person's peace of mind as carefully as his table. This is the medicine of its age, read for its order and its good sense, and not taken as advice for anyone's health.

Complexion and the degrees of medicines

Every body and every medicine has a complexion, a mixture of hot and cold, moist and dry, and a medicine's strength is measured in degrees. Arnald, following the Arabic philosopher al-Kindi, teaches that the degrees rise by doubling. A medicine hot in the first degree has twice as much heat as cold in it, in the second degree four times as much, in the third eight times and in the fourth sixteen. With that rule the physician can reckon the complexion of a compound from the strengths and weights of its parts, and fit it to the complexion of the sick person, so that it corrects the excess without overshooting it.

Daniel's numbers

As a reader of prophecy Arnald works from the book of Daniel: And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days. In prophecy, he holds, a day stands for a year. Counted from the day the sacrifice ceased, the twelve hundred and ninety years end within the century then about to begin, and so the coming of Antichrist is near.

The nearness is a call to reform. The Church must turn back to the poverty and plainness of the Gospel, its clergy must leave their wealth and their pride, and every Christian must amend his life while there is time. Such truths, he holds, may be shown to simple people and to laymen as well as to masters of theology, for God gives the understanding of the scriptures to whom he will.

The alchemy under his name

The books of alchemy printed under his name, the Rosarius philosophorum first among them, teach the stone in the language of sulphur and quicksilver: a single matter cleansed and joined in one vessel over a gentle fire, passing through black and white to red. They are the work of other hands, and the art they teach is taught on the pages of Alchemy.