In the summer of 1205, Hubert Walter, archbishop of Canterbury, suddenly fell ill with a deadly fever and carbuncle (anthrax) while traveling to Boxley in Kent. So severe was his illness that he was forced to divert to a nearby manor of his, Teynham. The carbuncle erupted around his waist, at the third-from-last vertebra of his back, with the inflammation extending around so as to threaten his private parts.

The archbishop, a remarkable lawyer who helped develop Henry II’s legal and financial system, had accompanied Henry’s son Richard the Lion- Hearted on a crusade to Palestine. In his illness, Hubert...

In 1264 the streets of London were torn by murderous riots. Although these insurrections are usually characterized as anti-Semitic, they were also directed against the Italians and French, who fled with the Jews for refuge to the Tower of London.¹ More than a century and a half later, the London mob attacked Dutch breweries, enraged by the rumor that foreigners were selling poison beer.² The causes of such disturbances, then and now, are complex, but viewed from a historical distance, these riots point to the fact that some residents obviously were viewed as outsiders, even though, like the Jews, they...

Medical texts from the English Middle Ages survive in large numbers and are the most obvious source of knowledge about the medicine of the period. These documents come in many forms and languages, from the gigantic LatinCompendium medicine(Compendium of medicine) of Gilbert Eagle (Gilbertus Anglicus) to short recipes and charms written in vernacular languages like English or French. Long texts often stood alone, but the shorter ones could be bound together with other medical texts or with material that, from a modern perspective, had little, if anything, to do with healing.

Medical texts in English, either in Old...

The twelfth century in Europe saw probably the most important development ever to knowledge about healing—the medical university. Before that time learned medicine was taught, along with other forms of dignified learning, in cathedral schools, monasteries, and private establishments. England had two of the oldest universities in the medieval West—Oxford and Cambridge—whose secular and church patrons strove to establish havens of leisure and intellectual sophistication for men studying for the priesthood. These retreats from clerical duty ideally would allow students to be educated to meet increasing demand both for educated parish priests and for learned jurists required...

Today people in developed countries have high expectations from scientific medicine and from the professionals and institutions that deliver it. Advances in public health, medicine, surgery, and related fields give wealthier people at least the hope that medicine will restore good health and prolong life. And rightly so—the state of modern scientific medicine would have been almost unimaginable even fifty years ago. Also understandable is the way medical historians have looked to the university-educated physician as the ancestor of today’s scientific medical practitioner. This point of view is well justified in that mastery of a set body of texts,...