Despite what you might think, medicine in the middle ages wasn’t
all silly superstition, pointless potions and fantastical folklore.
It’s true that medieval medics didn’t have things like vaccines
or antibiotics, and it wasn’t clear to them what caused many kinds of
disease. But even so, they drew on ancient wisdom, hands-on experience
and good old common sense to try to keep people healthy and alive.
Most leading medical minds of the time relied on the teachings of
three long-dead ancient Greeks - Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen.
Between them, these guys had some cracking ideas, as well as some
that were a little more …crack pot.
In terms of medieval medicine, their most influential theory was all about the importance of the four humours.
These humours were bodily fluids - blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Yum!
Most people agreed that keeping your humours in balance was the key to
good health. And the key to knowing your humours was to study your pee.
And they really studied it – they’d look at its colour and consistency,
and give it a good long sniff to work out what was what.
Even today, we still use urine to diagnose people,
but we don’t usually recommend blood letting, which was the most
common treatment of the middle ages. To rebalance your humours,
medieval doctors would pop leeches onto your skin and let them suck your blood.
But they also recognised the benefits of general healthy living,
and books of the time were full of advice about sleep,
exercise and diet that is just as relevant to us today.
Medics were into their herbs as well as their humours.
Many ordinary people had a good knowledge of natural remedies, and specialist
apothecaries had their own shops in towns and cities. Monasteries had
gardens where they grew plants like sage, mandrake, catnip and chamomile.
And some of the healing mixtures they used are still around today, like
liquorice for coughs, ginger for bad stomachs and even snail slime for burns.
Medieval people were also deeply religious, and many believed that if
you prayed to the right saints, they’d intervene on your behalf with God.
One practice was to visit a saint’s shrine and leave behind a bent silver
penny, or to burn a candle of the same length as your affected
body part. Even weirder were ‘birth girdles’ – parchments with images of
saints on them, which were wrapped around women as they gave birth.
So, you had the four humours, plenty of herbs and a good dose of religion.
But major injuries clearly needed something a bit more substantial, and that’s
where surgeons came in – often in the form of the 'barber-surgeon’.
That’s right – barber. Back then, the same chap who’d cut your hair could
also take out your teeth, stitch up your skull or lop off your leg.
They weren’t licensed doctors, but they could be pretty well trained.
Skilled barber-surgeons might even try something called trepanning to treat
seizures and mental illnesses. They’d cut a hole in your head,
expose the outer bits of your brain and, well, hope for the best. And remember,
this was all without anaesthetic or sterilized equipment!
Medieval medicine had plenty of other issues. Governments barely intervened
in public health, life expectancy was low, and doctors were helpless
when faced with major epidemics and plagues like the Black Death.
But for all its strangeness, medieval medicine wasn’t as mad as it’s often made out to be.
It was based on some sophisticated principles, it could often be highly creative,
and sometimes it could even make a good deal of difference to people's lives.