Chapter 29 - Medicine and the Mortal Body

Summary

This chapter addresses the tension between care for the body and care for the Christian soul within medieval medicine. In particular, it argues that medieval patients often devalued the skill and knowledge of physicians, since physicians were perceived to be overly concerned with the study of medicine rather than its praxis. Moreover, the relative inability of the medieval medical practitioner to combat death effectively (despite charging large fees for his service) led to the development of literary motifs mocking the incompetence of physicians. This chapter argues that Chaucer shared many medieval English prejudices against physicians as a social class, as well as the perception that human beings had only limited recourse against the dictates of mortality. It also provides a survey of many of Chaucer’s invocations of medical theory, and contextualises Chaucer’s attitudes to medicine and medical practice within a larger literary and historical context.