Category: Health & Medicine, Ancient Greece, U.S. National Library of Medicine, United States, Maryland

Last updated: 14 January 2009 The Loss and Recovery of Greek Medicine in the West After the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century, most works of the Greek physicians were lost to Western Europe. In the 14th and 15th centuries, however, Western Europeans began to rediscover Greek scientific and medical texts. This was due in part to the discovery of Arab repositories of learning in Spain and elsewhere during the Crusades as well as the immigration to Italy of Byzantine scholars at the fall of Constantinople in 1453.