It Will Help Him Wonderfully”
Placebo and Meaning Responses in Early Medieval English Medicine
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10781882 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rebecca Brackmann (0000-0003-3105-7256, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 97 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 1012-1039 |
| Publication date | 2022-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Speculum (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-7134 • E-ISSN: 2040-8072 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/721680 |
| OpenAlex | W4302760454 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
Many early English medical remedies have been dismissed, even by sympathetic scholars, as “mere placebo,” with the implication that therapeutic benefits to the patient, if any, are thereby insignificant. My article challenges such dismissals of placebo responses in Old English medicine. I draw on current research demonstrating that in certain conditions, a placebo effect, or “meaning response” (to use Daniel Moerman’s term), can have striking success in bringing about healing. I describe contemporary clinical practices shown to enhance patient responses to pharmaceutical treatments both inert and active, and demonstrate that these strategies are also visible in early English medical practice. Understanding the cultural components of belief that provoke placebo responses also allows a discussion of medieval medicine that does not force us to distinguish anachronistically categories of “magical” and “medical.” Ultimately, an understanding of the meaning response in medical treatment moves us beyond the simplistic binary of medical recipes that “work” (by modern biomedical standards) and those that do not, offering us a view of the interplay of chemical and cultural healing practices in embodied experience
Aesthetics · Alternative medicine · Art · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Meaning (existential · Medical education · Medical literature · Medical practice · Pathology · Placebo · Placebo response · Psychotherapist · Historical Philosophy and Science · History of Medicine Studies · Medicine · Pain Management and Placebo Effect · Philosophy · Psychology
Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine
The Powerful Placebo
Anglo-Saxon Plant Remedies and the Anglo-Saxons
Recipes and Everyday Knowledge
The Practice of Medicine in England about the Year 1000
Charms and Prayers in Medieval Medical Theory and Practice
What's Wrong with Early Medieval Medicine
Dun, Oxa and Pliny the Great Physician
Bald's Leechbook
A reassessment of the efficacy of Anglo-Saxon medicine
The several compilers of Bald's Leechbook
Bald's Leechbook and the Physica Plinii
Alfred, the Patriarch and the White Stone
Recipes and Everyday Knowledge
| Highly cited | No |
|---|