Published in Virtues and Principles in Healthcare

Keywords: Body, Doctrine for Children, History of Medicine, Ramon Llull.

Ramon Llull (1232-1316) in his work Doctrine for Children (c. 1274-1276) teaches his son Dominic that the human body is composed of four elements, an idea inherited from Greek medicine, and that such elements corrupt the man’s body. There are five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch. Through them, the man participates in external things. For the Mallorcan, bodily life is the actuality by which the body lives, and the spiritual life is to love God. From these principles, Llull teaches the child that he must love the bodily life and health because, through health, the soul and the body are convenient to each other, and the man lives by convenience.The purpose of this paper is to present the conception of Ramon Llull about the body as exposed on Doctrine for Children, methodologically combined with the historical perspective of Jacques Le Goff and Nicholas Truong in the work "A History of the Body in the Middle Ages".