Where the Middle Ages Begin
Between 541 and 543 AD, the Plague of Justinian, traditionally regarded as the first of three human plague pandemics, spread from either central Asia or Africa across the Mediterranean basin into Europe, killing an estimated 100 million people according to the contemporary scholar Procopius
The vast majority of surviving evidence for health care, medicine and attitudes to illness in early medieval northern Italy comes not from traditional medical texts, but legal, hagiographical and archaeological sources.
In other words, when spreading among cattle, a now-extinct morbillivirus episodically colonized and spread in human populations during the early Middle Ages.
When I decided to put pen to paper for a Tudor historical fiction story, I had no idea what I wanted to write. The subject has been analyzed and romanticized for five hundred years. What could I do that would be an original slant on this iconic subject matter? After having a look around I noticed that no one appears to have the exact moment of her execution. From there, the story began to slowly develop and present itself to me.
The Museum of London will be starting a ground-breaking research project to explore the effects of industrialisation on Londoners.
How did people Anglo-Saxon England treat a headache or indigestion? Here are fifteen cures for minor ailments from the Lacucgna, which include what to do if your finger nail falls off, and how Jesus Christ cured Peter’s toothache.
No mention of Richard’s distinctive physique survives from during his lifetime, perhaps out of respect to a reigning monarch, or perhaps because he hid it so well.
We talk about this project’s collaboration, the potential of medieval medicines, and her reaction to all the attention her research has generated.
Over a thousand years before Viagra was invented, medieval men were looking for ways to treat erectile dysfunction. We take a look at the prescriptions offered in one of the most popular medical textbooks from the Middle Ages.
Analysis of a latrine in Jerusalem that dates back over 500 years finds human parasites common in northern Europe yet very rare in Middle East at the time, suggesting long-distance trade or pilgrimage routes and shedding light on prevalent infectious diseases of the age.
In his paper, ‘Malaria and Malaria-Like Disease in the Frankish Empire, c.450-950, Timothy Newfield examines over fifty references to illnesses which appear in Merovingian and Carolingian sources
A group of Norwegian and Swiss researchers have uncovered links between climatic changes in central Asia and repeated outbreaks of the Bubonic plague in Europe, starting with the Black Death in the 14th century.
Burial grounds ‘a thousand-year history’ into human health
Dr. DeWitte will discuss how bioarchaeological research on past epidemics such as the Black Death can improve our understanding of emerging diseases and human-pathogen coevolution in general, and the potential it has to provide tools for dealing with disease in living populations.
If you follow the advice of Caterina Sforza, ‘you will see that thing become so narrow that you yourself will be in admiration.’
Thank-you to Kele Cable of the University of Minnesota for allowing us to post his Storify account of the Visualizing the Body Symposium, held in November 2014
Remnants of the genetic makeup of plague bacteria have been found in thousands of victims of the Black Death and the major plague epidemics at the end of the Iron Age. The DNA analyses may predict the next plague outbreak.
In 1510, there was little appreciation that a specific respiratory disease might have been recurring over centuries, but historians now believe that influenza had probably been circulating as an epidemic disease since as early as the 9th century AD, if not earlier.
By end of the thirteenth century, surgeons and university-trained physicians in Western Europe had a plethora of authorities from the Greco-Roman and Arabic tradition from which to consult for the treatment of snake-bites.
Danish researchers have found that the fires used for cooking and heat in Viking-era houses would have caused significant indoor air pollution.
Maimonides explains what to do when you believe someone is trying to poison you, and what were some of the most dangerous poisons of the Middle Ages.
A look at cosmetics and make-up in the Middle Ages.
‘This procedure is liable to resolve itself into physical combat between the surgeon and his patient.’
A brief look at how the medieval world viewed the Intersex individual.
How to maintain one’s health in the Middle Ages – the advice from the Tacuinum Sanitatis
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