Medicine & Society in Later Medieval England

"My PhD was in the social history of medicine. I concentrated on the 17th century; this book is about the medieval period. It’s an approachable study of the relationship between people in general and medical knowledge and medical treatment. The great thing about the medical approach is that it’s a litmus test for how things are in general. If you want to understand how a society is getting by, look at people’s health, look at their diets and the impact on their bodies—because it’s the underpinning of everything they do. Some of the earliest universities—Salerno, for example, in Italy—were founded to teach people medical texts. They offered didactic courses and there wasn’t much experimentation. They were largely forcing down students’ throats text translated back into Latin from Arabic sources which were preserved ancient sources, like the texts of Galen, written from the third century onwards. So medieval doctors were not without knowledge. You and I would not trust it because, on the whole, the man and woman in the street today knows better than a medieval physician, surgeon, or apothecary. But they were able to impart hope to people. And, in some cases, especially with surgery, they did have good skills. They could conduct reliable operations. It has to be admitted that the chances of infection with a lot of these operations were very high because they had zero understanding of the necessity of cleanliness. They did not understand germ theory—no one did until the 1870s. But increasingly through the 14th to 15th century, medical knowledge was one of the few areas of life where you can say without fear of contradiction that there was progress. It became more efficacious, more successful. There were English medical practitioners who were widely respected in their own day. John of Arderne, for example, wrote a book about how to proceed with an operation for anal fistula, which many men got from riding horses in wet weather for too long. His procedure for this was carried out many times successfully, apparently. Then you have John Bradmore, who successfully managed to extricate an arrowhead that went into Prince Henry’s face at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. How do you get out a barbed arrowhead that’s gone into the prince’s face without killing him? Well, Bradmore did it and wrote a treatise about how he did it, which is now in the British Library. The medical men of the day were faced with huge challenges, but they rose to them. There’s a degree of courage in what they did. There’s a degree of knowledge in their achievements too. There’s also a social impact, basically buoying everybody and carrying them along. You get an ailment and it’s not necessarily the end. She covers a huge array of medical dimensions and social attitudes towards medicine and food in a relatively short book. I’d recommend it to anybody who’s got any interest in medieval society."