The present article focuses attention on the singularity of Arnau de Vilanova's medical thought in comparison with that predominating among his thirteenth-century contemporaries on the European continent. Moreover, it propounds that such peculiarities were a result of Arabic influences upon this Christian thinker during his youth, in his native city of Valencia, and which continued to prevail even after his studies at the Montpellier School of Medicine. That is why the study first draws a sketch of Valencia's cultural and scientific universe, and then goes on to analyze well-known aspects of Arnau de Vilanova's medical ideas, where the enduring preponderance of the Valencian environment is evident, even in his later years.
history of medicine; mediaeval science; pharmacology; iatrochemical