Professor Emerita
faith.wallis [at] mcgill.ca
Faith Wallis is a historian of medieval medicine and science. She received her BA and MA in History from McGill, and her doctorate from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. She is jointly appointed with the Department of History and Classical Studies, an Affiliate of the Centre for Medieval Studies (Toronto), and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
Research Interests:
Faith Wallis's main research interest lies in the production and transmission of textualized medical and scientific knowledge in western Europe, particularly in the 11-13th centuries. Her publications focus on the evolution of new forms of learning and writing, on translation and transmission of texts, on commentaries and the teaching of medicine, and on the manuscript vehicles of medical texts. She is presently editing the medical writings of master Bartholomaeus of Salerno (d. ca. 1170), and is also editing and translating Alexander Neckam's (d. 1217) De naturis rerum (On the Nature of Things).
Selected Publications:
Medieval Medicine: A Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
The Herbal of al-Ghāfiqī. A facsimile edition of MS 7508 in the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University, with Scholarly Contributions. Ed. F. Jamil Ragep and Faith Wallis. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014.
"Medicine and the Senses," in A Cultural History of the Senses. Vol. 2: the Middle Ages, ed. Richard Newhauser. 133-152. New York: Berg, 2014.
"Salsamenta pictavensium: Gastronomy and Medicine in Twelfth-Century England" (with Giles Gasper). English Historical Review 131; 553 (2016): 1353-1358.
Agents of Transmission, Translation and Transformation in Medieval Cultures. Ed. Faith Wallis and Robert Wisnovsky. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016
"Pre-Modern Surgery: Wounds, Words and the Paradox of 'Tradition'." In Palgrave Macmillan Handbook of the History of Surgery, ed. Thomas Schlich. London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.
Courses Given:
HIST 249 Health and Healer in Western History
HIST 356 Medicine in the Medieval West
HIST 449 Medicine in the Ancient World
HIST 452 Medicine in Europe 1500-1700,
HIST 567D1/D2 Seminar: Medieval Medicine