Dangers of Noncritical Use of Historical Plague Data
When scholars fail to apply source criticism or do not reflect on the content of the data they use, the reliability of their results becomes highly questionable.
Social Perception of Infertility and Its Treatment in Late Medieval Italy: Margherita Datini, an Italian Merchant’s Wife
This article seeks to elucidate the common social perception of infertility and its treatment in late medieval Europe by analyzing the case of Margherita Datini, an Italian merchant’s wife who lived in the 1400s.
Breaking Skin in Early Modern Italy
This paper presents the challenges of representing infirmities, from smallpox to toothache, that involved rupturing the skin posed in Early Modern Europe.
Medical Auxiliaries from the Physician’s Viewpoint in Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Medical Texts
Medical auxiliaries from the physician’s viewpoint in Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance medical texts: codifying professional skills or establishing a hierarchy? By Dina Bacalexi and…
The Experience of Sickness and Health During Crusader Campaigns to the Eastern Mediterranean, 1095–1274
This thesis proposes the reading of medieval chronicles, specifically those of the crusades, for their medical content. The crusades left a mark on the historical record in the form of dozens of narrative sources, but texts such as these are rarely considered as sources for medical history.
Sin, Salvation and the Medieval Physician: Religious Influences on Fourteenth Century Medicine
During the plague’s fourteenth century outbreak, a variety of medical cures and theories existed that would baffle the modern physician, but perhaps the most striking difference between fourteenth-century medicine and modern medicine was the involvement of religion.
The Medieval Origins of the Concept of Hypertension
Despite the well-known history of hypertension research in the modern era, main points in the medieval concept of this disease and its early management methods remain obscure.
Making Modern Migraine Medieval: Men of Science, Hildegard of Bingen and the Life of a Retrospective Diagnosis
This article uses Hildegard as a case study to shift our focus from a polarised debate about the merits or otherwise of retrospective diagnosis, to examine instead what happens when diagnoses take on lives of their own.
Law and Mental Competency in Late Medieval England
Between the late thirteenth century and 1540, when Henry VIII established the Court of Wards and Liveries, the English royal courts oversaw hundreds of inquisitions involving individuals thought to be idiots or ‘natural fools’.
Morbidity and mortality of leprosy in the Middle Ages
During the Middle Ages, nearly everyone in Europe was exposed to the disfiguring, painful and ostracizing disease of leprosy. But did contracting the disease necessarily increase a person’s chances of dying?
Pharmacy, Testing, and the Language of Truth in Renaissance Italy
This article examines the role of testing and innovation in sixteenth-century Italian pharmacy. Apothecaries were less concerned with testing drugs for efficacy or creating novel products than with reactivating an older Mediterranean pharmacological tradition and studying the materials on which it relied.
An Assessment of the ‘Sweating Sickness’ Affecting England During the Tudor Dynasty
This strange disease, known variously as “sweating sickness,” Sudor anglicus, or simply the “Sweat” occurred almost exclusively in England and only during the first half of the Tudor dynasty, seemingly vanishing in 1551.
The Roots of Persecution: a comparison of leprosy and madness in late medieval thought and society
In light of the similar moral and spiritual content of leprosy and madness as concepts, this comparison indicates that a morally condemned or stigmatized condition was not sufficient to generate persecution, or to produce a persecuted social identity.
Medical and Dietetic References in Medieval German Cookbooks
Medical and Dietetic References in Medieval German Cookbooks By Marialuisa Caparrini I castelli di Yale online, Vol.5:1 (2017) Abstract: This article aims at…
Military Surgical Practice and the Advent of Gunpowder Weaponry
Using both late medieval surgical manuals and examples of gunshot wound treatment found in chronicles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it shows instead that those late medieval surgeons who treated gunshot wounds did so in a manner not unlike their treatment of non-gunshot wounds, without cauterization.
Pharmacy, Testing, and the Language of Truth in Renaissance Italy
This article examines the role of testing and innovation in sixteenth-century Italian pharmacy. I argue that apothecaries were less concerned with testing drugs for efficacy or creating novel products than with reactivating an older Mediterranean pharmacological tradition and studying the materials on which it relied.
Malaria and malaria-like disease in the early Middle Ages
This paper clears up contours of malaria’s occurrence in Frankish Europe. It surveys sources relevant to its study and establishes guidelines for retrospectively diagnosing the disease.
The sex-selective impact of the Black Death and recurring plagues in the Southern Netherlands, 1349-1450
We present a newly compiled database of mortality information taken from mortmain records in Hainaut, Belgium, in the period 1349-1450, which not only is an important new source of information on medieval mortality, but also allows for sex-disaggregation.
Medieval Medicine for Modern Infections
Recent scholarship may show that there is more methodology to the medicines of medieval practitioners and further inquiry may show that their medicines were more than just placebos or palliative aids but actual antibiotics being used long before the advent of modern infection control.
Heads, shoulders, knees and toes: Injury and death in Anglo-Scottish combat, c.1296-c.1403
For all that has been written about this period, little, however, has been produced regarding the realities of war, the impact that it had on the individual soldier, or the wounds suffered by those who engaged in these conflicts.
What You Look At, You Make: Menstruation and Fertility in Italian Renaissance Art
This project seeks to better comprehend Renaissance Italian attitudes towards menstruation and its roles in art through fertility imagery.
Women’s Medicine and Female Embodiment in the Morte Darthur, a Middle English Trotula Treatise, and The Mists of Avalon
In this essay, I will read the Morte Darthur alongside the Middle English Trotula treatise, a fifteenth-century gynecological handbook, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, a twentieth-century fantasy adaptation of the Arthurian legend.
Getting High in the Middle Ages: Hashish in Medieval Egypt
In recent years, there has been a contentious debate on how should society deal with drugs like marijuana. Should it be legalized and accepted? What is the harm or benefits of these drugs? The same questions were being raised in medieval Egypt.
Pain in Medieval and Modern Contexts
The interplay between Christian religious belief and medicine in the High Middle Ages was complicated.
A Medieval Cure for Baldness
Medieval men also worried about losing their hair. They could turn to Hildegard of Bingen to provide them with a cure for baldness.