The achievements of past scholars make me humble, and my work is built on theirs. History is a collective enterprise, and the debt any of us owes to the labors of others cannot be ignored. The world of medieval English medical culture is complex, too complex for one historian to grasp. But as valuable as these primary sources have been, the work of other historians and social scientists has been even more useful. ![]() Evidence from medical texts, university and church records, legal documents, and literary sources have proven rich resources for this study. The struggles of learned physicians to establish a reputation for themselves and for their medicine are an important part of this argument, as are the public character of health and disease, and the struggle of the medical practitioner to develop an audience for medical learning, especially among the elite of later medieval English culture. This book, and the central argument concerns how this learning, understood as the medicine that was written down in texts, gained an audience among English people. Medical learning in medieval England from about 750 to about 1450 is the focus of Medicine, like poetry, required an audience to grow. In any culture, the reputation of the healer is vital for these practices to flourish. And the social consensus of any culture must derive from the complexities of the culture itself. A healer, Le´viStrauss concluded, “did not become a great shaman because he cured his patients he cured his patients because he had become a great shaman.”2 The work of Le´vi-Strauss and others confronts one of the most troubling aspects of the history of medicine in prescientific culture: why did people adhere to practices that modern science finds nonsensical? The anthropologist answers that this happened because of the social consensus that such practices were effective. Whether a particular practice “really” worked, then, was much less important than the audience’s belief that it had. This complex consisted of the healer, the afflicted, and what he called the “social consensus.” The belief of the healer’s audience (which included the afflicted) in the success of the healing practice was more important than any other factor in determining the secure place of a particular shaman in his or her culture. Claude Le´vi-Strauss, in his Structural Anthropology, studied the role of the shaman, or traditional healer, among the Kwakiutl Indians of the Vancouver region.1 He postulated what he called the “shamanistic complex” to explain the remarkable success of the shaman among his or her people. ![]() In this context, astrological medicine is best understood not as irrational and erroneous but rather as a complex system of explanations, many of which could be justified empirically or historically, based on a particular society’s beliefs about the functioning of the natural world. If we find the medieval medical patron’s obsession with uroscopy or astrology, for instance, to be bizarre or amusing, and wonder why anyone took such methods seriously, then we must also remember that these methods were, like the medical patron, firmly rooted in a particular time and place. But no person living in a prescientific culture could be expected to count scientific medicine among his or her many healing choices. The ways of our early ancestors may seem foolish to us: herbalism, philosophical advice, magic, or so-called folk remedies-all of which seem to be based on luck, superstition, or error. THE TRIUMPH of modern scientific medicine in contemporary Western culture has been so complete we often forget that, before science, the person wishing to preserve or regain good health was presented with many alternatives, none of which was entirely satisfactory from a modern point of view. Well-Being without Doctors: Medicine, Faith, and Economy among the Rich and Poor ![]() The Institutional and Legal Faces of English MedicineĬhapter V. The Medieval English Medical TextĬhapter IV. Medical Travelers to England and the English Medical Practitioner AbroadĬhapter III. The Variety of Medical Practitioners in Medieval EnglandĬhapter II. When a man has sinned against his Maker Let him put himself in the doctor’s hands. R487.G47 1998 160′.942′0902-dc21 98-3534 This book has been composed in New Baskerville Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Includes bibliographical references and index. Copyright 1998 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Getz, Faye Marie, 1952– Medicine in the English Middle Ages / Faye Getz.
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