Healthcare Archive
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Civic and Religious Understanding of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled of Medieval England
Posted on May 20, 2013 | No CommentsThis brief summary covered the fourth paper given at KZOO's Mental Health in Non-medical Terms. It covered ways in which theologians, like Thomas Aquinas, tried to categorize mental disability. Aquinas also tried to prove that the mentally impaired were able to receive sacraments depending their lucidity and where they fit in his four categories. It was an interesting and enjoyable paper. -
Mental Disability and Intellectual Impairment in the Middle Ages: Some Preliminary Research Findings
Posted on May 19, 2013 | No CommentsThis interesting paper was one of the four given in the Mental Health in Non-medical Terms session at KZOO. It looked at philosophy, iconography and the way mental disability was viewed in the Middle Ages. -
Going Mad in French: Royal Notaries and Charles V’s Translation Project
Posted on May 19, 2013 | No CommentsThis was another interesting paper from the Mental Health in Non-medical Terms session at KZOO on notaries, and how crimes committed under "mental duress" were processed. -
Man Bites Dog: Alarming Effects of Medieval Animal Venom
Posted on May 16, 2013 | No CommentsThis paper was part of a fantastic series on mental health and disability in the Middle Ages. It was very humorous. This paper examined various types of bites, the "medieval symptoms" and some cures. So if you don't want to bark like a dog, or lash out at people with your teeth, read on... -
Signs and Senses: Diagnosis and Prognosis in Early Medieval Pulse and Urine Texts
Posted on April 28, 2013 | No Commentsin which they were made. These early medieval anthologies are quite different from Scholastic anthologies such as the Artkella, which were compiled as curriculum texts for the new, formalized medical instruction of the nascent universities. -
The Death Toll of Justinian’s Plague and Its Effects on the Byzantine Empire
Posted on April 4, 2013 | No CommentsIn 541 a plague arrived in Egypt and rapidly began to spread. The following account of the beginning of the plague, while clearly an exaggeration still shows the impact of the disease. -
“Morus per se?”: Pain and its Treatment in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-century Europe
Posted on March 3, 2013 | No CommentsYet of the many medical conditions that face human beings, pain is one of the most valuable to study from a sociocultural perspective. Pain can be methodologically difficult to study. At once reactions to pain are universal and yet the experience is fundamentally solitary and isolating. -
The monastic contribution to mediaeval medical care
Posted on January 13, 2013 | No CommentsThe function of hospitals and monasteries was roughly the same. Illness was regarded by most people as a form of divine punishment. The monasteries were founded on private initiative to intercede for the souls of the living and the dead. -
Excavating All Saints: a medieval church rediscovered
Posted on January 1, 2013 | No CommentsWhen excavations started at the site of the ‘lost’ church of All Saint’s in York, archaeologists knew they would find burials. What they found was much more than expected: an Anchoress and the remains of soldiers who helped Oliver Cromwell take the city at the Siege of York in 1644. Lauren McIntyre and Graham Bruce explain the evidence. -
The Impact of Climate Change on Late Medieval English Culture
Posted on December 28, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis challenges the extremes of both environmental determinism and the modernist perspective that humanity exists in social and/or cultural isolation from the natural environment. -
Animal keeping and the use of animal products in medieval Emden (Lower Saxony, Germany)
Posted on December 20, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis deals with the faunal remains from several excavations in the centre of the medieval town of Emden (Lower Saxony, Germany; Figure 1-1). The aim of this thesis is to answer questions concerning the development of animal husbandry and the use of animal products in the medieval period. -
Suicide in the Middle Ages
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsAll three types of source need careful interpretation. Suicide is notoriously elusive to records even in modern times, and more so for the Middle Ages. Once due allowances have been made for each genre, however, it is some reassurance that they agree on certain basics, and that these, in turn, agree with estimates from better-recorded centuries... -
Neither ill nor healthy: The intermediate state between health and disease in medieval medicine
Posted on December 16, 2012 | No CommentsParadoxically, however, the notion of an intermediate state between health and disease also has a long history, harking back, at least, to the times of Galen. The question of the existence of such a state and the utility and necessity for physicians to acknowledge it, was particularly hotly debated in the Middle Ages... -
The Black Death And The Future Of Medicine
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper will specifically focus on the effects of the Black Death on medicine and medical practice in Europe. Its purpose is to investigate the Black Death’s influence on medicine, especially with regard to learned medicine and surgery. -
The Politics of Madness: Government in the Reigns of Charles VI and Henry VI
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsThis approach is further hampered by the continually changing nature of modem psychology. Due to alterations in the criteria used for diagnoses, terms and illnesses become obsolete, thus negating our previous theories. -
Juana “The Mad”: Queen of a World Empire
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsIt was not until the mid-nineteenth century that scholars discovered new material about Juana in the Spanish and Austrian archives that gave another side to the person of the woman who had been con- sidered “la loca.” -
A Marginal Occupation? The Medieval Laundress and her Work
Posted on November 22, 2012 | No CommentsThe wider study of an ostensibly menial activity that, with certain notable exceptions, offered insecure and poorly paid employment to illiterate women of low status is certainly beset with problems. -
Medicine and Health Care in Later Medieval Europe: Hospitals, Public Health, and Minority Medical Practitioners in English and German Cities, 1250-1450
Posted on November 18, 2012 | No CommentsThis interdisciplinary study, written from the standpoint ofan aspiring physician, seeks to contribute to the humanistic dimension of medicine by helping to integrate it further with its past, illuminating the meaning of health and disease in medieval society while adding depth to current thinking about medicine and public health. This study places various aspects ofhealth and disease within the framework of two major topics, religious beliefs and urban social history. -
Bishopstone, Sussex – A Quiet, Rural Anglo-Saxon Village? What the Human Remains Tell Us
Posted on October 26, 2012 | No CommentsThe primary aim of this text is the analysis and report of the skeletal human remains from the excavation of the late Anglo-Saxon settlement and cemetery at Bishopstone, East Sussex. The analysis of the skeletal remains covered the basic data: sex, age, stature, palaeopathology and dental pathology. -
The medical practitioner in Anglo-Saxon England
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsSome indication of his appearance may be suggested from several surviving illustrations where the leech is portrayed at work. -
You Are What You Eat: Hildegard of Bingen’s Viriditas
Posted on October 21, 2012 | No CommentsHildegard argues in the beginning of Physica that humans become what they eat. -
Paget’s disease in an Anglo-Saxon
Posted on October 21, 2012 | No CommentsA recently excavated skeleton from an Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Jarrow Monastery is described.Virtually all the bones are abnormal, having the morphological and radiological features of Paget's disease.It is one of the most convincing examples in the annals of palaeopathology and confirms the antiquity of this condition. -
Maculate Conceptions
Posted on September 30, 2012 | No CommentsFor the greater part of human history...disease has been understood in terms of its manifestations on the outside of the body. more than any other sign, t has been spots that have signified the onset of disease... -
“A Swarm in July”: Beekeeping Perspectives on the Old English Wið Ymbe Charm
Posted on September 14, 2012 | No CommentsAt the same time, however, their differing responses to the remedy attest both to the variation of beekeeping practices and the multivalence of Wið Ymbe itself. The fact that two beekeepers interviewed within two days and two hundred miles of each other can respond differently to the charm’s advice on swarms suggests that we reevaluate unilateral assertions regarding what the text might have meant across the hundreds of years that we now know as the Anglo-Saxon period. -
The Virtues of Balm in the Late Medieval Period
Posted on September 8, 2012 | No CommentsThe nature of balsam and its qualities, especially the ability to act as an extraordinarily effective preservative, demands further inquiry. Is this Lydgate’s invention, or instead a reflection of late medieval ideas about a particular natural substance?
