Where the Middle Ages Begin
Medieval cities are often viewed as environmental accidents waiting to happen. ‘The visual virtues of medieval towns’, reckons one textbook, ‘were grimly offset by the dismal ineptitude of public health services and municipal control over the environment … Squalor, dirt, discomfort and disease were the accepted lot of medieval man.’
Medieval medicine as a scientific discipline was constituted generally in the 11th and 12th century on the basis of Latin translations of Arabic and Greek medical texts.
Professor William Ayliffe provides an overview of some of London’s most important medieval hospitals, including St Bartholomew’s, St Thomas’ and St Mary’s Bethlem, and compares our own healthcare systems with those of the Tudors, in terms of cleanliness, dignity to patients and even hospital architecture.
Diseases specifically affecting women that are discussed in medieval Arabic literature largely concern the reproductive organs, complications before and after childbirth, lactation, and child-rearing.
In England, there was a long tradition of medical texts written in the vernacular beginning in the ninth century. These texts showed a surprising array of health remedies for women, including prayers, charms, incantations, and herbal concoctions.
This dissertation tests the hypothesis that urbanization in a medieval Polish population caused the general quality of life to decline. Furthermore, it will test the hypothesis that these consequences of urbanization occurred gradually and were not severe.
In the fourth century AD the cultural centre of the Mediterranean area shifted to Byzantium (Constantinople) and from there medical knowledge in the form of Galenic teaching spread to the Arabs by way of the exiled Nestorians…
The study of the works of celebrated physicians of that era reveals that many of them had especially been occupied with the specialties of gynecology and obstetrics.
Glaring at us from the pages of illuminated manuscripts, royal sepulchers, and frescoes of Late Medieval churches and cemeteries, macabre cadavers, with their gaping, vermin-infested torsos, emaciated bodies, and grimacing faces, shock and repel.
The present paper surveys the medicinal applications of a number of fossils which were well known in classical, mediaeval and renaissance times….
Psychological and psychiatric ailments must have baffled early medical practitioners.
Despite oppression of scientific learning through the Dark Ages, the medical school at Salerno emerged in the ninth century, reviving the tradition of the Ancient schools. How is it that a school founded by monks was able to flourish, promoting the development of future European Universities?
The Black Death of 1347-50 has fascinated both researchers and lay people for over six hundred years1. The medieval epidemic had profound consequences both culturally and demographically and it did much to shape human history.
Leprosy or Hansen’s Disease represented a major social, moral, and health concern during the Middle Ages. Few diseases have evoked the social responses that leprosy did during the Middle Ages
Medieval French literature provides the modern researcher with references to the healing arts in many passages that are incorporated into prose or poetic works.
An interested student or scholar wishing to inquire about the essentials of herbalism in the Byzantine Empire likely will be led into the Greek texts on gardens, well illustrated by the Christian “dream garden” as published in Greek…
The presence of innumerable eunuchs at the Byzantine court seems to be in conflict with the laws that severely prohibited eunuchism. The Roman emperors early formally prohibited this practice, at least within the boundaries of the empire.
Since ancient times animals and products derived from different organs of their bodies have constituted part of the inventory of medicinal substances used in various cultures; such uses still exist in ethnic folk medicine.
The history of lovesickness in the Middle Ages is the record of physicians’ attempts to understand what happens to the body and the mind when passion renders a lover a patient.
The Church Fathers and intellectuals made the distinction between the miracle of the relics and sacred words of the Bible, verba sacra….
What do the 2012 summer Olympics and medieval scholarship have in common? For both, London will be the site of extraordinary achievements.
Some aspects of the history of blind education, deaf education, and deaf-blind education with emphasis on the time before 1900.
This symposium explores the social stigmatization of disease by considering the long-term history of leprosy: from the origins of the pathogen Mycobacterium leprae to the foundation of leprosaria in late medieval Europe to the creation of leper colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries.
To what extent was mental illness attributed to the devil? What was the view of illnesses which had physical signs and non-physical signs? What about mental illness caused by trauma?
Early medieval churchmen, rulers, and jurists saw multiple things in abortion and there were multiple perspectives upon abortion.
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