Gilles de Corbeil

Gilles de Corbeil, known in Latin as Egidius de Corbolio, was a French royal physician, teacher and poet, born around 1140 in Corbeil and dead by the first quarter of the thirteenth century. He studied at the medical school of Salerno, where he praised his teachers Romuald Guarna and Peter Musandinus, and became a teacher himself. Returning to Paris, he became a canon and physician to King Philip II of France, and he is the only teacher of the University of Paris from that period known by name. He wrote medical teaching poems in Latin hexameter: one on Salernitan drug therapy, short mnemonic poems on urine and on the pulse that were copied and commented on for centuries, and a long poem on the signs and symptoms of disease. He also wrote a sharp satire on corrupt churchmen, the Ierapigra.