Cormac MacDonlevy or Cormac Ultaigh, sometimes, also spelled Ultach, was an influential medieval Irish physician and medical scholar of the Arabian school educated at Universities on the Continent. He is famed for advancing Irish medieval medical practice by, for the first time, translating seminal Continental European medical texts from Latin to vernacular. His translations provided the, then, exclusively, Irish speaking and normally hereditarily apprenticed majority of Irish physicians with their first reference access to these texts. Cormac was descended of the MacDonlevy, which family last ruled the Ulaidh as a nation and which family was also one of Ireland's ancient hereditary medical families. In their diaspora after the fall of the Ulaidh's last patronage Ulidia these royals sought asylum in the then still Gaelic Kingdom of Tyrconnell, where some of their number were named to the high Gaelic status of ollahm leighis or the official physicians to the O'Donnell dynastyKings of Tyrconnell. In or about 1470, Cormac MacDonlevy, M.B. commenced the daunting 12-year task of first translating the French physician Bernard of Gordon's most celebrated and extensive medical work, the Lilium medicine, from Latin to Irish. Thereafter, as it had some 150 years earlier with the Continental European medical community, the monumental Lilium medicine or English "Lily of Medicine" achieved great popularity among the medical community of the Celtic nations. Cormac, also, first translated Gordon's De pronosticis and Gaulteris Agilon's De dosibus from Latin into Irish. Gaulteris' De dosibus is a pharmaceutical tract and well used historical source, providing a concise introduction to the basic principles and operations of medieval European pharmacy. Cormac, too, first translated from Latin to Irish the French surgeon Gui de Chuliac's Chirurgia and, also, 5 other major Continental European medical texts in addition to those hereto cited. While brief biographical mentions for Cormac are contained in various British and Irish biographical dictionaries, what little is actually know of Cormac, himself, is extracted from credits in his works of medical translation, including from scribed colophons thereof. As detailed here in reference, the manuscripts are housed in various libraries in Ireland and Britain.
