VI.4 - Medical practice and theory

Summary

The practice of medicine in England before the late twelfth century and the theoretical assumptions that underpinned it have been subject to a comprehensive process of reassessment over the last three decades, with the result that sources formerly regarded as little more than ‘magic gibberish’ are now viewed in a far more positive light. Charles Singer's often-quoted dismissal of Anglo-Saxon medicine as the ‘final pathological disintegration’ of a once-great classical tradition was largely based upon his reading of Oswald Cockayne's influential edition of the principal medical texts of the tenth century. Produced in the 1860s with a lengthy introduction that emphasized the ‘superstitious’ and ‘irrational’ element of works such as Bald's Leechbook and The Old English Herbarium, Cockayne's idiosyncratic and often inaccurate translations were embellished with archaisms designed to make them appear even more outlandish and primitive. It is thus hardly surprising that, with a few exceptions, subsequent generations of medical historians tended to regard the years between 900 and 1150 as a dark age, when links with both the classical past and current intellectual developments on the Continent were lost through ignorance, and when healing was largely subsumed into folklore.