Medieval Medicine

There were two main forms of medical practitioners in the Middle Ages, as I've mentioned before, the highly-trained theoretical ones, and the ones with practical experience but little training.  In the first group were those who attended medical school—Salerno and Montpellier both had medical schools by the thirteenth century (and indeed still do).  The second group included barber-surgeons and midwives.  And then there were those somewhere in between.

Much theoretical medicine was based on ancient texts, especially Aristotle.  People who had never looked at an actual dissected body looked at drawings in books and believed them.  One recurrent problem was that the drawings of what was supposed to be the human liver actually portrayed a pig's liver—you can tell the difference because a pig's liver has lots of protruding lobes, which the human liver does not.

Much theoretical medicine was based on the theory of "humours," the four fluids that were supposed to shape not only one's health but one's personality:  blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.  The idea went back to Hippocrates.  We still use the terms "sanguine" (meaning confident) and "phlegmatic" (meaning rather calm and unemotional), personality traits associated with the predominance of one of the humours.  For medical purposes, it was believed that many ills could be cured by rebalancing the humours, which is why bleeding was long practiced as a way to cure people for whom blood had (supposedly) become too dominant.

Theoretical medicine also assumed that nature gave us hints about curative properties.  So caraway seeds were thought to help cure infertility if glued to one's thigh, the idea being that the seed shape would inspire other seeds to take root.  (The church considered reliance on caraway seeds a heresy.  This didn't stop it.)  If medieval doctors had had kidney beans (they didn't, as they are New World), they would have confidently (even sanguinely) said that they were good against kidney disease.

Medically trained doctors also believed that the worse the disease, the more powerful the medicine needed to be.  If one were given a good dose of mercury, it's true that you wouldn't have to worry about dying of the bubonic plague.

Barber-surgeons, on the other hand, had a good practical knowledge of how the human body worked from having cut up a few.  The prohibition against dissecting bodies only started during the Protestant Reformation.  Barber-surgeons had lots of sharp knives, used both for shaving and for surgery, and they would cut up living people too, to get rid of cancer or to deliver a breech baby (one might survive the former, maybe, but not the latter).  They of course did not have anesthesia or what we would call sterile conditions, though they did try at least for the latter.  After all, even though they didn't know about bacteria (no one did until the nineteenth century), they certainly knew about infection.

Cataracts might be treated by applying a hot iron to the eye.  Thanks, I'll stick with modern approaches.

Midwives delivered babies and dealt with other feminine ailments.  They were big fans of caraway seeds.  Women gave birth sitting up (or reclining) rather than lying on their backs with their feet in the air (the twentieth-century method), which gave gravity a chance to help out.  Maternal mortality was higher than in the modern West but lower than in the nineteenth century, when doctors would give women in labor lots of chloroform, having come straight themselves from trying to treat someone with an infectious disease, without washing up.

Then there was the help-the-sick-stay-warm-and-clean approach adopted at hospitals, of which a number were built between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries.  They were generally staffed by nuns; British nurses are still called Sister.  Here the ill were fed chicken soup and sprinkled with saint dust and, with luck, their immune systems would kick in and they'd feel better.  (See more here on medieval hospitals.)

People working at the hospitals tried to create good combinations of herbs that might be medicinal.  They would watch what plants animals ate to see what might be safe.  A typical medicine might be dried quince, rose syrup, and ginger, all cooked together in wine.  (Had to be better than mercury.)

The above is a cabinet of medicinal herbs at a medieval hospital.


© C. Dale Brittain 2019

For more on medieval health and hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.