Search

For several decades now, medical practices referred to as traditional or natural have been increasingly popular in Western society. These practices are often perceived, defined, and connoted as medieval, regardless of their characteristics and historicity. Attributing traditional medicine to a generic medieval time reflects one of the most relevant contemporary cultural phenomena: the pervasiveness of images, narratives, and references to the Middle Ages in popular culture. However, this Middle Ages is not the historical period interpreted through the sources; it is a dreamed, imagined, meta-historical time, represented according to the dual model of the Dark Ages and the 'good' Middle Ages of fantasy, fairytale, nature not yet subject to modernity and techno-science. The imagined Middle Ages is the field of study of a specific disciplinary area, medievalism. This paper aims to identify the representations of medieval medicine that this reshaped and imagined medieval world produces and disseminates in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the latest historiographical guidelines, aimed at providing a comprehensive understanding of individuals involved in healthcare activities during the Middle Ages. If one approaches medieval care without adopting a modern professional standpoint, the picture is much broader, more complicated, and less rigid than commonly portrayed. The use of this non-teleological approach also allows overcoming some traditional divisions, such as those between sacred and profane, between the early and late Middle Ages, and between learned and empirical physicians. The therapeutic journey that a patient can undertake becomes enriched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the varied spectrum of healers to whom the sick people could turn to in Middle Ages, including physicians, surgeons and different kind of empirical practitioners, the saint was often the first to whom they would refer. Miracle tales, therefore, represent an essential source for a historical investigation into diseases and sick people. Without claiming to be exhaustive, this article aims to briefly outline this topic through several examples taken from miracles accounts in some canonization processes and Libri miraculorum, compiled between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. It will be highlighted how these sources, when properly interpretated, are of fundamental importance for understanding the relationship between the sick and his/her community of reference, as well as the work of some empirical healers who approached the sick person's bedside. Furthermore, these sources are unique lexicographical treasures related to the vocabulary of disease - an aspect still largely overlooked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most surprising aspects of the history of surgery in the medieval and early modern periods is the intense use of vernacular languages in the dissemination of treatises on the subject, via translations, and even in the writing of originals. This vernacularization of surgery began in the thirteenth century and is closely associated with the creation of a new medical system in the Latin West and with the birth of a rational "new surgery", linked to Galenism, to school education, and to the transmission of knowledge in books. This article presents a summary of this interrelationship and the role played by the vernacularization of surgery in the success of these processes, and it upholds the need for an interdisciplinary research methodology in order to gain an overall understanding of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]