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Miraculous Healings of Paralysis: A Preliminary Study on Sources
Posted on June 17, 2013 | No CommentsThe aim of the present paper has been to explore the medieval evidence on miraculous healings of paralysis and to confront it with modern medical knowledge. -
Agatha, Clerical ‘Wife’ and Wet Nurse to King John of England, Longtime Companion to Godfrey de Lucy, Bishop of Winchester
Posted on June 15, 2013 | No CommentsAgatha’s life, like that of her mistress Eleanor of Aquitaine, is remarkable in an age when women’s innate inferiority and wives’ subordination to their husbands were almost universally accepted, and discussions of women and marriage in learned treatises, sermons, and vernacular stories were 'at worst misogynistic and at best ambivalent.' -
Scientific research reveals insights into medieval leprosy
Posted on June 14, 2013 | No CommentsWhy was there a sudden drop in the incidence of leprosy at the end of the Middle Ages? -
Concepts of Contagion and the Authority of Medical Treatises in 14th-16th Century England
Posted on June 11, 2013 | No CommentsIn particular, it analyses the history, contents, audience, and codicology of six English tractates, four addressing the plague and two addressing the sweating sickness. The central question asked is whether and how historians’ reliance on medical texts has limited the historiography of contagious disease. -
Rubus Pharmacology: Antiquity to the Present
Posted on June 8, 2013 | No CommentsThis short article presents only a sample of the wealth of historical reports of medicinal uses for Rubus. -
The Calamitous Fourteenth Century in England: All Doom and Gloom?
Posted on May 28, 2013 | No CommentsThis was a fantastic paper given at the Crown and Country in Late medieval England session at KZOO. There were only two papers but both were interesting and enjoyable. This paper delved into the history of science in late medieval England and examined why the fourteenth century, a time that is usually synonymous with doom and gloom, plague and uprising, wasn't all that bad upon closer observation. -
Reading between the lines: Old Germanic and early Christian views on abortion
Posted on May 24, 2013 | No CommentsThe object of my studies was to determine whether women in the early medieval Germanic West (could have) committed abortion, when confronted with an unwanted or inconvenient pregnancy. -
Word of Mouth: Charlemagne’s Capitulare de Villis
Posted on May 23, 2013 | No CommentsXavier Riaud examines The Capitulare de Villis, one of Charlemagne’s documents which has a surprising dental content. -
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. -
Prince Hal’s Head-Wound: Cause and Effect
Posted on May 20, 2013 | No CommentsThe future King Henry V was hit by an arrow to the face at the Battle of Shrewsbury - how did he survive? -
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... -
Plague of Justinian was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, scientists confirm
Posted on May 14, 2013 | No CommentsThe Black Death, which caused the deaths of tens of millions of people in the fourteenth century, was caused bacterium Yersinia pestis. New evidence now shows that the same microscopic bacterium also caused the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century. -
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. -
Dancing plagues and mass hysteria
Posted on April 28, 2013 | No CommentsJohn Waller on how distress and pious fear have led to bizarre outbreaks across the ages -
Richard III may have gone through painful medical treatments to ‘cure’ his scoliosis
Posted on April 25, 2013 | No CommentsScoliosis – a lateral or side-to-side curvature of the spine – can be a very painful condition to live with. But some of the treatments practised in the late medieval period would have themselves caused sufferers a lot of anguish. -
Food Recipes from the 12th-century discovered in manuscript
Posted on April 16, 2013 | No CommentsScholars have found a collection of food recipes dating back to the twelfth-century, making them the oldest western medieval culinary recipes known to exist. -
The Rise and Fall of Syphilis in Renaissance Europe
Posted on April 14, 2013 | No CommentsWhat exactly were the features of the disease at the moment of its appearance in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century? How many years did it take for the early, virulent form to be replaced and become endemic? -
Horticulture and Health in the Middle Ages: Images from the Tacuinum Sanitatis
Posted on April 14, 2013 | No CommentsThe relationships between plants and health have been and continue to be of great concern for humankind considering both diet and medicinal uses. -
Did people in the Middle Ages take baths?
Posted on April 13, 2013 | No CommentsA closer look shows that baths and bathing were actually quite common in the Middle Ages, but in a different way than one might expect. -
Bīmāristān Al-Manṣūrī: State and Medical Practice in Mamluk Egypt (1285-1390)
Posted on April 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe Bīmāristān was the major part of a huge complex built in the center of Cairo in 1285 by the Mamluk Sultan al-Manṣūr Qalāwūn, who was the founder of the Qalāwūnid dynasty/dawlah that ruled the Mamluk empire for over a century -
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. -
From Marvels of Nature to Inmates of Asylums: Imaginations of Natural Folly
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsEven human beings were collected when their physical or mental state did not fit the norms of men. According to an inventory in 1621, the portrait gallery of Ambras showed pictures of people who were perceived as giants, dwarfs, or so-called hirsute men. -
Sleep paralysis in medieval Persia – the Hidayat of Akhawayni
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsSleep paralysis, a rapid eye movement (REM) parasomnia, is characterized by a period of inability to perform voluntary movements at sleep onset (hypnagogic form) or upon awakening (hypnopompic form).