The past, present, and future of medical humanities (original) (raw)
Related papers
Medievalism and the Medical Humanities
postmedieval, vol. 8.2, 2017
He was a verray, parfit praktisour' (Benson, 1987, 30). This is the highthough in context equivocal-praise given to the Physician, one of the pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The endorsement is based on the Physician's knowledge of his subject: he has expertise in medicine and surgery, including the humoral system and astrology-'magyk natureel' (Benson, 1987, 30). He is deemed a successful physician for his ability to discover an origin and remedy for every illness: 'The cause yknowe, and of his harm the roote, / Anon he yaf the sike man his boote' (Benson, 1987, 30). Direct engagement with the 'sike man,' however, seems limited, and indeed, it was not until the eighteenth century that medical practice would include physical examination of a patient. In Chaucer's depiction, there is no real sense of individual diagnosis, but rather of a framework applied to 'sickness' so that a solution can be found as efficiently as possible. The Physician's main interest proves to be his fee. How influential, then, was the patient, or the individual more generally, in shaping medieval conceptions of medicine and wellbeing? What were the roles of society, economics, politics, culture, and language? What were the boundaries between illness and health, how were normal and
A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages - front matter
A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages, 2021
The Middle Ages are well-known for the growth of universities and urban regulations, plague pandemics, increasingly sophisticated ways of causing injury in warfare, and abiding frameworks for health and illness provided by religion. Increasingly, however, archaeologists, historians and literary specialists have come together to flesh out the daily lives of medieval people at all levels of society, both in Christian Europe and the Islamic Mediterranean. A Cultural History of Medicine in the Middle Ages follows suit, but also brings new approaches and comparisons into the conversation. Through the investigation of poems, pottery, personal letters, recipes and petitions, and through a breadth of topics running from street-cleaning, cooking and amulets to religious treatises and death rituals, this volume accords new meaning and value to the period and those who lived it. Its chapters confirm that the study of latrines, patterns of manuscript circulation, miracle narratives, sermons, skeletons, metaphors and so on, have as much to tell us about attitudes towards health and illness as do medical texts. Delving within and beyond texts, and focusing on the sensory, the experiential, the personal, the body and the spirit, this volume celebrates and critiques the diverse and complex cultural history of medieval health and medicine.
2005
This short essay (1) explains methods for researching the history of medical ideas in medieval Europe, which usually involves examination of medical texts; and (2) the history of medical practices and practitioners, which can be researched both through medical texts and a variety of other sources. On the former topic, I also address three problem areas in working with medical manuscripts: (a) the absence of any single dictionary devoted to medieval medical terminology; (b) the variety (and often, inconsistency) of technical abbreviations used in medical texts; and (c) the relationship between medical texts and the images that accompany them. The bibliography presented here is heavy on sources for England since at the time that's where the heaviest investment had been made in finding aids. Since 2005, an enormous number on online resources has become available. For an updated assessment of the general field of medieval medical history research, see Monica H. Green, “Integrative Medicine: Incorporating Medicine and Health into the Canon of Medieval European History,” History Compass 7, no. 4 (June 2009), 1218-45, doi: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x.
2009
Hitherto peripheral (if not outright ignored) in general medieval historiography, medieval medical history is now a vibrant subdiscipline, one that is rightly attracting more and more attention from ‘mainstream’ historians and other students of cultural history. It does, however, have its particular characteristics, and understanding its source materials, methods, and analytical limitations may help those not trained in the field better navigate, explore and potentially contribute to its possibilities for illuminating the intersections of medicine and health with other aspects of medieval culture. Although this article focuses primarily on western Europe, many of its observations are also relevant to the Islamic world and Byzantium precisely because all three cultures shared many of the same intellectual traditions and social structures. The attached bibliography serves as a general introduction to the current state of the field.
Green and Muehlberger Twitter Q-and-A on the State of Medieval Medicine
Twitter, 2020
On 10 February 2020, Ellen Muehlberger and I engaged in a question-and-answer session on Twitter, revisiting a 2009 essay of mine that had appeared in the journal *History Compass*. The essay had offered a survey of the state of the field of medieval medical history. It was pitched specifically at "general" medieval historians: those who did not identify as doing medical history, but may have had some cause to engage with medical historical questions in the course of their research. In this Q-and-A, Muehlberger asks me to reflect on my particular motivations in writing the essay; why the topics of health and disease are particularly challenging to research since there are no special archives for such materials; and what points I'd want to stress if I were to attempt a new overview of the field a decade later. Since long Twitter threads can sometimes be a challenge to read, I have reformatted our exchange here, correcting typos and providing some links. I'd be happy to respond to further queries, either on Twitter (@monicaMedHist) or via e-mail (monica.h.green@gmail.com).
Medieval Medicine: Health and Disease in the Middle Ages
Despite our popular understanding of the European middle ages as a dirty, disease-ridden, hopelessly backward period, the sources show us quite a different picture. Although a lack of understanding of the means of genetic change and the cause of viral and bacterial disease caused medieval people to understand the human body very differently than we do, their medical systems were not without logic and efficacy. This course explores the human body and its diseases in the middle ages through a series of connected readings that introduce the body as a conceptual system and medieval science's attempts to understand it. We use the growing field of genomic research as a way of understanding and comparing our modern systems of understanding the body to those in the past. By exploring the field of pathogenomics, we also explore how newer scientific technologies are helping historians learn about the past in new ways.
What's Wrong with Early Medieval Medicine?
Social History of Medicine, 2011
The medical writings of early medieval western Europe c. 700 -c. 1000 have often been derided for their disorganised appearance, poor Latin, nebulous conceptual framework, admixtures of magic and folklore, and general lack of those positive features that historians attribute to ancient or later medieval medicine. This paper attempts to rescue the period from its negative image. It examines a number of superficially bizarre writings so as to place them in an intellectual and sociological context, and to suggest that the presumed contrast between them and their ancient and later medieval counterparts has been wrongly drawn.
This chapter deals with medical practice in Western Europe, the institutions and circumstances that shaped it, and their evolution during the period from about 1050 to 1500. I have taken "practice" in its broadest sense, to refer to the varied activities engaged in by medieval Europeans of all classes in order to manage illness and to repair or maintain health. It includes approaches that spanned what we would call religion, magic, and science -the boundaries between those categories were less distinct in the Middle Ages -and included activities as varied as domestic nursing, faith healing, and the founding and administration of hospitals, as well as the work of the men and (occasionally) women who practiced physic and surgery in accordance with the principles of learned or text-based medical knowledge. 1 If medicine as a learned discipline was shaped primarily by the relationship between academic writers and their students and colleagues, 2 historians of medical practice focus rather on the relationship between healers and the sick. The distinction is both important and fairly recent. Earlier historians of medieval medicine tended to rely disproportionately on the perspective of learned surgeons and, especially, physicians, as well as on the atypical example of Paris. This resulted in a picture of medical practice that overemphasized the importance of elite healers and attributed to them (and to university culture in general) an exaggerated role in health care institutions and practices, prompting premature claims about the emergence of medicine as a "profession" in the late Middle Ages. More recent historians have recast the problem, focusing less on the power and authority of academically trained doctors over their patients and other practitioners than on the "negotiation," 1 Medical practice should not be confused with practical medicine, or practica, which was the part of the learned discipline of medicine that dealt with diseases and their treatment. On the distinction between practice and practica, see Geneviève Dumas and Faith Wallis, "Theory and Practice in the