4 - The Medical Culture of Friars

Summary

This chapter seeks to answer the question, ‘Was there a distinctive medical culture of friars in England?’ It will consider the kinds of medical interest shown by friars, as evidenced by their writings – what they read and studied, and what they communicated to others. The evidence available to us comes in the form of manuscripts, written, compiled, owned and used by friars. This means that our evidence is affected by gaps caused by the effects of catastrophic scattering of the friars’ persons, convents and their books in the 1530s. Even when the books survived, there are sometimes difficulties involved in identifying friars’ books, given the fragmentary evidence of identity and ownership. But there is still sufficient evidence to allow us to estimate the distinctiveness of the medical culture of the friars.

Distinct from what? Our idea of medicine in the central and late Middle Ages in England has been shaped overwhelmingly by the rise of the universities. Oxford and Cambridge were comparatively late on the scene, but faculties of medicine were in existence from the early fourteenth century. The English universities were following the examples of Paris and Montpellier, where the faculty of medicine was for teaching medicine to students who had already qualified as masters of arts. In Italy, there were doctoral colleges associating professors of medicine with physicians practising in the towns, while the student university conjoined the study of arts and medicine (although courses in arts and medicine were taught separately). In both forms of university, the teaching of medicine in the classroom, as in the arts curriculum, called for the provision of authoritative texts of Greek and Islamicate sources in Latin translation; the writing of commentaries, compendia and glossaries on them by teachers or masters; note-taking by students; and records of questions disputed and resolved. University-trained physicians (and later, surgeons) wrote expository texts on the practice of medicine as well as on the theory of medicine. These last ran through causes of disease, through diagnosis of signs, prognosis and treatment, and were written to establish norms of medical practice, since students of medicine were expected eventually to become practitioners. The masters who taught medicine were also themselves practitioners.