Introduction

This was the opening to the trailer for the documentary Carles Bosch presented in 2010 after spending two years with his camera following Pasqual Maragall, the ex-mayor of Barcelona and president of the Generalitat de Catalunya (the Government of Catalonia), who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2007.

The loss of short-term memory revealed by this simple test was an indication of a more general mental deterioration and finally, the loss of one's own identity.

It is striking that at a time and in a society where the training of memory has been reduced to a vestige of what happened in an often criticized educational past and where all kinds of technological devices lead to the effective disembodiment of its intended functions, it is precisely the progressive loss of individual memory that marks the ago-nizing step from being to not-being. It seems that, faced with the process of dissolution of the “I,” we can only wait and hope for a new and improbable “magic bullet” to be offered by advances in neuroscience, while care networks, remunerated or not, struggle to offer basic care to patients who are ever more dependent.

We might expect that in another historical time and in a society like the late-medieval, where memory was essential in cultural life and one of the highest values for a human being,3 its change or loss would also be the subject of social concern and interest by physicians. However, the assumption that changes to basic functions of our organism must necessarily be understood in any time and place as problems that medicine must solve is a misleading premise that can easily lead to error, as medical anthropology and the history of medicine have frequently shown.4 So, to tackle the theme of this chapter, the first question should be whether, in late-medieval Latin society, memory and its loss were considered an issue to be conceptualized and dealt with by academic medicine. We will see that surviving university sources, both the texts read and those produced in the medieval universities, invite us to respond affirmatively.